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Chapters
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Contents
Chapters
Chapters at a glance
Slaughterhouse-Five has 10 chapters.
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Chapters10 items
Chapter 1
Vonnegut steps in front of his own novel to explain why it took him twenty-three years to write a book about the firebombing of Dresden.
Chapter 2
Billy Pilgrim's story begins, but not in order. We learn he has 'come unstuck in time,' meaning he involuntarily slides between moments of his life without warning.
Chapter 3
Billy's time-travel continues to jump between his wartime capture and his postwar civilian life. As a POW, he marches with other American prisoners and eventually encounters the c…
Chapter 4
Billy's time-travel takes him back to the night of his abduction by the Tralfamadorians and forward to his life on Tralfamadore, where he is kept in a zoo with a Montana Wildhack,…
Chapter 5
This chapter is the longest and most wide-ranging in the novel. Billy's time-travel covers his time in the Dresden slaughterhouse before the bombing, his postwar recovery in a vet…
Chapter 6
Billy and the other American prisoners are put to work in Dresden, a city the Germans consider safe enough that it barely needs guarding.
Chapter 7
Billy and the surviving prisoners come out of the slaughterhouse to find Dresden flattened. They are put to work as a corpse-mining crew, digging bodies out of the ruins.
Chapter 8
This chapter moves between several time periods. Billy is back on Tralfamadore, where Montana Wildhack has joined him and they have formed a genuine relationship.
Chapter 9
Billy's wife Valencia dies in a car accident while rushing to the hospital after his plane crash. She crashes her car and inhales carbon monoxide.
Chapter 10
The final chapter returns to Vonnegut's own voice more directly than any chapter since the first. The war in Vietnam is still going.
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