Summary Of Bill Pilgrim's Slaughterhouse-Five

A recurring theme in Slaughterhouse-Five is that of the multiple realities that exist within the book. Bill Pilgrim, the main protagonist of the book, is said be “unstuck in time”, and hence, the novel follows Billy’s persistent

The Narrator

Because of the semi-biographical nature of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrative of the inset can be classified as being in third-person and/or through a first person point of view. However, the vast majority of the novel is written in a third-person narrative, with the narrator narrating the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim’s, life in a non-linear manner.
This seemingly- omniscient narrator however, intrudes unabashedly throughout the story on several occasions by reinforcing his participation and witnessing of the ongoing events through the statement, “I was there” (pg. 67; 212), thereby authenticating his narrative. The narrator attempts to narrate the novel through the protagonist, Billy Pilgrim’s, point of view. This is suggested when an American POW “had excreted everything but his brains” on the train to Dresden (pg. 125)- “that was I. That was me. That was the author of this book”,

PTSD has been associated with long-term exposure to warfare or other threats to a person’s life , to which Billy have had encounters with throughout the duration of the war. Evidence of Billy's PTSD include the fact that he ascribed the faces of the guards in Dresden, in reaction to the bombing, as “a silent film of a barbershop quartet” (pg. 178), likely due to the indescribable nature of the violence. Subsequently in Billy’s life, as he travels with his father-in-law to Montreal via a chartered plane, the singing of a barbershop quartet named ‘The Febs’ triggers a series of memories of the war for Billy, including the hanging of a “Pole” (in reference to a Polish person) “in public, three days after (he) got to Dresden” (pg.