The questions are not designed to test you but to help you to locate and to understand characters, settings, and themes in the text. They do not normally have simple answers, nor is there always one answer. Consider a range of possibly interpretations - preferably by discussing the questions with others.
Page references are to the Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Edition, but the sections of the book to which questions refer are indicated, so it does not much matter what edition you are using. So it goes …
The novel begins with the ‘author’ giving the background to its conception: his difficulty finding the words to write his “famous Dresden book” (4); visiting Bernhard V. O’Hare, an old friend who was there in Dresden, and the two going back to the city on a tour of Germany in 1967. One would normally expect material like this in a Preface or Introduction, but here it is Chapter One of the novel. You might ask yourself how this affects your reading of the book.
Every time the narrative refers to a death, it is followed by the phrase, “‘So it goes.’” What does it mean? Is there a contradiction between this phrase and the ‘author’s’ attitude to preventing wars and tyranny?
1. What does the ‘author’ aim to convey to the reader when he writes that, on his visit to Dresden, he and O’Hare “made friends with a cab driver … His name was Gerhard Müller” (1)? What does Müller mean by the phrase “‘if the accident will,’’ and why does the ‘author’ “like it very much” (2)?
2. A limerick and a song are quoted. How does each relate to the ‘author’s’ feelings about “how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been” (2)?
3. Why does Harrison Starr feel that anti-war novels are pointless? What metaphor does he use to express his view? How does the ‘author’ react to this viewpoint?
4. Explain the irony of the fate of Edgar Derby. (Clue: Consider the range and variety of the souvenirs taken by the other returning prisoners.)
5. Explain what the ‘author’ means by the sentence, “The best outline I ever made, or anyway the prettiest one, was on the back of a roll of wallpaper (5). (Clue: This outline represents events in linear fashion. That’s why the ‘author’ will find it useless.)
6. Why does the ‘author’ call himself “Yon Yonson”? (Clue: How does Yon experience time?) Account for the ‘author’s’ nocturnal activities. (Remember these telephone calls. Billy Pilgrim will get one of them towards the end of the novel.)
7. How is the ‘author’s’ experience of studying anthropology at the University of Chicago related to his experience as a reporter at the same time? Lots of detail is given of the mechanisms used to file his stories. Why?
8. When the ‘author’ describes how the dead elevator operator looked to Nancy the woman writer, she is “eating a Three Musketeers Candy Bar” (9). Comment on the irony of connecting these two things (i.e. the mutilated man and the Three Musketeers). [Be on the lookout for further occasions when The Three Musketeers will pop up in the narrative.]
9. How does the ‘author’ react when a Chicago professor to whom he describes his experience in Dresden tells him of the German concentration camps?
10. What irony does the ‘author’ note about his experience of “the ones who’d really fought [in the war]” (10)?
11. What is absurd about the refusal of the U.S. Air Force to release information about the Dresden operation?
12. Why does the ‘author’ highlight the reaction of the two girls to their first sight of a river? Comment on the simile “[the] carp … were as big as atomic submarines” (11).
13. Why is Mary O’Hare angry at the ‘author’? How does he manage to make her his friend?
14. What does the story of the Children’s Crusade as told in the novel add to your understanding of the attitude to war shared by the ‘author’ and the O’Hare’s?
15. What is the point of including the extract from Mary Endell’s book?
16. What does the ‘author’ find significant about what he and the two girls saw at the New York World’s Fair? What seems to be missing from the World’s Fair presentations?
17. Why is any book about a massacre going to be a failure?
18. The bird asks “‘Poo-tee-weet?’” (18). What answer does the ‘author’ have to the question about what to say about a massacre? Is it a satisfying answer (to you)?
19. The chapter ends with quotations from Roethke, Celine and the Bible. What point does each make? How is each related to the theme of the novel? Why does the ‘author’ love Lot’s wife for looking back at Sodom and Gomorrah?
The ‘author’ describes an experience with time rather like that of Billy Preston. Waiting for a missed flight in a Boston motel, he finds that he experiences time differently from the way the clocks display it, “Time would not pass” (19). Humans have to believe that time exists as clocks and calendars say that it exists (i.e. sequentially), yet our subjective experience of time is often very different (e.g. something that happened twenty years ago can feel more now than now).
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This is the start of the novel narrative. The story of Billy Preston is told by a third person narrator, but this narrator makes no claims to be omniscient - there are things he does not know. The chapter begins with Billy’s life story. Inevitably, it is punctuated by a number of deaths: his father is killed in a hunting accident; he is the one of only two survivors in a plane crash; and his wife dies of accidental carbon monoxide poisoning on her way to visit him in the hospital after the plane crash. Even without war there is plain old death - and there is nothing anyone can do about it!
The narrative switches around a lot:
Billy Preston’s life before and after the Second World War;
Billy’s claim to have been abducted by Tralfamadorians in 1967;
Billy’s daughter Barbara’s reaction to his writing about his abduction in a newspaper;
Billy’s training as a chaplain’s assistant in 1944;
Billy’s wandering behind enemy lines with Roland Weary (and two scouts) following a German advance at the Battle of the Bulge;
Roland Weary’s childhood in Pittsburgh and his fascination with torture;
Roland’s fantasy version of his war experience;
Billy’s first experience of coming “unstuck in time” (41) [For details, see #32 BELOW.]
Weary drags Billy out of the forest. The two scouts ditch Weary and Billy;
Billy experiences another time-shift. 1957 he gives a successful acceptance speech as President of the Lions Club;
Weary blames Billy for the destruction of the Three Musketeers.
20. “Billy Preston has come unstuck in time … He says” (22). Comment on the significance of the last two words of this quote. What do they show about the relationship of the narrator to Billy Pilgrim’s story?
21. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth being time. Humans see moments sequentially and chronologically. How do Tralfamadorians see moments? What are the advantages of seeing life in this way? Where does the narrator explicitly accept this philosophy? 22. What does Billy mean when he sees himself as “doing nothing less now, he thought, than prescribing corrective lenses for Earthling souls” (27)?
“Billy says” his first experience of being unstuck in time to 1944 and describes two incidents, one in training and one in combat (29). Barbara, however, points out that he “‘never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash’” (28). If Barbara is right, then the story of being abducted by Tralfamadorians is all in Billy’s imagination, an elaborate fantasy to find a rationale to allow him to live with the terrible memories of Dresden.
23. As a chaplain’s assistant in the war, Billy is “a figure of fun in the American Army” (29). What details does the narrator include to enhance the comedy?
24. The first time Billy “came unstuck in time” is in 1944 (29). Why, in retrospect, does Billy come to feel that everyone being “theoretically dead” is “a Tralfamadorian adventure” (30)? Comment on the irony of his father’s very real death at this same time.
25. Billy finds himself trapped behind German lines with two scouts and Roland Weary, an antitank gunner, following the German advance at the Battle of the Bulge. What is ironic about Weary’s claims to have “been saving Billy’s life for days” given the consequences of the one shot Weary “fired in anger” (32).
26. What explanation is suggested for Weary’s obsession with methods of torture?
27. What impact does the crucifix that his mother bought have on Billy? Explain the implication of the narrator’s comment, “Like so many Americans, she was trying to construct a life that made sense from things she found in gift shops” (37).
28. Comment on the absurdity of the four pieces of reading material that Weary carries. Ditto the stern warning that the condoms are, “‘For the Prevention of Disease Only!’” (38).
29. What does the use which André Le Fèvre makes of the new technology of photography suggest about the dangers of technological advance in general?
30. Comment on Weary’s fantasy version of his war experience? Weary thinks of himself and the two scouts as the Three Musketeers. Where has reference previously been made to the Three Musketeers? What is the connection?
31. When Billy “first came unstuck in time” (41) in the forest hiding from German soldiers, he has the following time-shifts:
After death;
Pre-birth;
At the Y.M.C.A. pool with his father;
1965 visiting his mother at Pine Knoll old people’s home and being in the waiting room there;
1958 at a Little League Banquet;
1961 at a New Year’s Eve party where he is unfaithful to his wife and ends up drunk in the back seat of his own car;
What common threads or themes can you find in these events? Comment particularly on the staff judge advocate’s summary of the reason why Private Slovik should be executed for desertion. Twice (at least) in this chapter Billy wants to give up on life but is dragged back into living by someone else. What are the incidents? This predisposes Billy to feel that he does not have control over his own future.
32. How does Weary’s fantasy about the Three Musketeers end?
33. Why does Billy begin to laugh involuntarily when Weary says, “‘You shouldn’t even be in the Army’” (48)? Why does Weary start to beat Billy up?
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