47 Fun Facts About Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy Pilgrim's son Robert, a teenage troublemaker, grows up to join which US special forces unit?

The Green Berets: the former troublemaker ends up fighting in the Vietnam War as a Green Beret.

What is Billy Pilgrim's job in the US Army during World War II?

Chaplain's assistant: barely trained, Billy never meets his chaplain or gets a proper helmet or boots, and ends up wandering lost behind German lines.

What does a filmmaker tell Vonnegut to write instead of an anti-war book?

An anti-glacier book: what he meant, Vonnegut explains, is that wars will always come and are as easy to stop as glaciers.

Which planet's inhabitants abduct Billy Pilgrim and put him on display in a zoo?

Tralfamadore: after a 1968 plane crash Billy tells a New York radio show about the abduction, and his daughter Barbara has to fetch him home.

Which three-word phrase does Slaughterhouse-Five repeat whenever a death is mentioned?

'So it goes' is what Billy's alien abductors say about the dead, since to them a person who dies is still just fine in plenty of other moments.

What does Roland Weary call himself and the scouts?

Three Musketeers: the name was news to the two scouts, who soon tell Weary that he and Billy are on their own.

What is the first sentence of Slaughterhouse-Five?

'All this happened, more or less.' The narrator hedges at once: the war parts, anyway, are pretty much true.

What is the subtitle of Slaughterhouse-Five?

A Duty-Dance with Death: the main title names the Dresden slaughterhouse where Billy is held, whose underground meat locker shelters the prisoners from the firebombing.

To whom did Vonnegut promise to call the book The Children's Crusade?

Mary O'Hare, his war buddy's wife, said they had been babies in the war, so he promised a book with no part for Frank Sinatra or John Wayne.

What does Billy Pilgrim do for a living after the war?

Optometrist: Billy marries the daughter of the optometry school's owner, whose backing sets him up in practice and makes him rich.

In which New York town does Billy Pilgrim live?

Ilium: after surviving a plane crash, Billy writes to the town's newspaper about the aliens who, he says, kidnapped him.

During which engagement is Billy captured by the Germans?

The Battle of the Bulge: lost behind German lines, Roland Weary is in the middle of beating Billy up when German soldiers find them.

How does Roland Weary die?

Gangrene from wounds caused by wooden clogs: his captors take his boots and make him march in clogs that cut into his feet.

What did fellow POW Paul Lazzaro do back home in Cicero, Illinois?

Stole cars: in the prison camp he tries to swipe cigarettes from a sleeping British officer, who wakes up and beats him.

For what crime do German soldiers execute Edgar Derby after the bombing?

Stealing a teapot: Derby, who had stood up to the American Nazi recruiter Howard Campbell, is shot for taking one from the ruins.

What was Edgar Derby's job before the war?

High school teacher: at forty-four, Derby had pulled political strings to get into the army.

In the veterans' hospital, which fellow patient introduces Billy to science fiction novels?

Eliot Rosewater: like Billy, he is haunted by what he saw in the war, and the two find the novels help them cope.

What is Kilgore Trout's day job?

Manages paperboys: his novels have never made money, so he gets by bullying the boys who deliver the local paper.

What do Billy's alien abductors look like to humans?

Upright toilet plungers: unable to sleep on his daughter's wedding night, Billy walks out to meet their flying saucer.

Who is placed in the zoo alongside Billy as his mate?

Montana Wildhack: a film star who vanished from Earth, she wakes up in the zoo beside Billy, and they have a child together.

What do Billy's alien abductors say only Earthlings ever talk about?

Free will: to beings who see every moment at once, things simply are the way they always will be, so there is nothing to choose.

How does Billy's wife Valencia die?

Carbon monoxide poisoning after a car crash: she is rushing to visit Billy, who has survived a plane crash, when she wrecks her own car.

With whom does Billy share a hospital room after the plane crash?

A Harvard history professor: at first he does not believe Billy was in Dresden, but in the end he is convinced.

How is Billy killed in 1976?

Shot with a laser gun by an assassin: Billy has just told a Chicago stadium crowd he is about to die, and the killer was hired by the elderly Paul Lazzaro.

Which prayer hangs framed on Billy Pilgrim's office wall?

The Serenity Prayer hangs there, yet among the things Billy cannot change, the book adds, are the past, the present and the future.

'If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for' whom, according to a phrase Billy repeats to himself?

Wild Bob: a dying colonel, he invites the prisoners to a reunion in his hometown that he will not live to see.

American-born Nazi Howard W. Campbell Jr. is the protagonist of which other Vonnegut novel?

Mother Night: there Campbell turns out to be an American double agent whose Nazi radio broadcasts secretly pass coded information to the US.

Bertram Rumfoord is likely related to Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character from which Vonnegut novel?

The Sirens of Titan: there Winston flies his own spaceship into a time warp and comes out able to foresee the future.

What does the bird say in the last line of Slaughterhouse-Five?

'Poo-tee-weet?': there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, Vonnegut explains, so he gives the last word to a bird.

In Dresden, what does the factory where Billy and the other prisoners work produce?

Malt syrup: meant for pregnant women, it is so delicious that Billy sneaks a spoonful to Edgar Derby, who bursts into tears.

Whose 1963 book The Destruction of Dresden supplied Vonnegut's death toll of 135,000?

David Irving: his toll proved badly inflated, with the real figure no more than about 25,000, and he later became notorious for minimizing the Holocaust.

What did a North Dakota school board do with its Slaughterhouse-Five copies in 1973?

Burned them in a furnace: Vonnegut wrote to the board's chairman asking whether his letter, too, would be consigned to the fires of that furnace.

Which 1982 US Supreme Court case concerned removing Slaughterhouse-Five and other books from school libraries?

Island Trees v. Pico: by 5 to 4 the court went against the board, which had called the books anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic and just plain filthy.

How did the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library answer Republic High's 2011 ban of Slaughterhouse-Five?

Offered 150 free copies to students: an anonymous donor paid for the books so Republic High's students could read the novel and decide for themselves.

For which two science fiction awards was Slaughterhouse-Five nominated in 1970?

The Nebula and the Hugo: the novel won neither, but the 1972 film of it went on to win the Hugo for best dramatic presentation.

At which film festival did the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five win the Jury Prize?

Cannes: some scenes were filmed in old Most, a Czech town then being torn down to mine the coal beneath it.

Who directed the 1972 film of Slaughterhouse-Five?

George Roy Hill: Vonnegut raved about his version, calling it a flawless translation of the novel to the silver screen.

Which pianist's recordings of Bach are used throughout the 1972 film?

The fourth Brandenburg concerto accompanies Billy's first sight of Dresden.

Which fairy tale do the English prisoners at Billy's POW camp stage as a play?

Cinderella: Billy laughs at it so hysterically that he is sedated with morphine, and he later wears the play's silver boots.

Looking for the kitchen, what do Billy, Derby and Werner Gluck walk in on?

Showering refugee girls: they had fled heavily bombed Breslau, only to die in the Dresden firebombing.

Slaughterhouse-Five lost both of its 1970 science-fiction award nominations to which novel?

The Left Hand of Darkness: Le Guin later turned against the novel's use of 'he' for its androgynous people.

How does Billy's father try to teach him to swim?

Throws him in the deep end: Billy sinks straight to the bottom of the pool, and someone has to rescue him.

What did Michael Palaia, Vonnegut's fellow POW near Dresden, take that got him executed?

A jar of food: the prisoners were clearing Dresden's rubble on near-starvation rations.

Billy Pilgrim ends up owning half of three stands selling which frozen treat?

Tastee-Freeze: yet for all his business wealth, Billy now and then weeps quietly for no apparent reason.

In 2013 Guillermo del Toro said he wanted to adapt Slaughterhouse-Five with which screenwriter?

Charlie Kaufman: del Toro wanted a more literal take than the 1972 film, feeling Vonnegut's play with time had been too edgy for film back then.

How do Billy's alien abductors say the universe will end?

A pilot tests a new fuel: Billy had expected Earthlings to be the threat, and the aliens cover their eyes at his stupidity.

Whose name is on the 'for President!' bumper sticker on Valencia Pilgrim's Cadillac?

Reagan: Valencia's sticker backs a man who failed to win the 1968 Republican nomination but later became president.