Slaughterhouse Five
The first half of the book is already really confusing. The way the author goes back and forth between each setting makes it much harder to read than a normal novel. The character Billy Pilgrim is traveling through time between his present time, World War II, and some where in 1967. At first Billy Pilgrim goes to the house of one of the soldiers he fought the war with, immediately the wife of the soldier obviously doesn’t like him. Billy Pilgrim doesn’t know why until after he discussed the war with Bernard O’Hare. The wife didn’t mind Billy Pilgrim she was just angry with the war in general. She wasn’t happy that they were trying to remember what happened just so Billy could write a book about it. Remembering what happened during the war brings Billy back to Germany and he goes on to describe what Dresden was like. He and another soldier were captured by the Germans and were forced to give up their shoes. A photographer saw this and took a picture of it for the Germans and wrote an article about how the Americans were so rich but couldn’t properly fit their army. Traveling back to 1945 Billy Pilgrim gets married and they have two children together, Barbara and Robert. From there he goes back to school and becomes an optometrist. From there Barbara gets married and finds out that her father has gone mentally insane. In the mean time his son was sent into the army and his wife died from carbon monoxide poisoning while he was away. He begins to publish letters to the newspaper about how he was captured by aliens in 1967 called Tralfamadorians. Going back to World War II the soldiers keep on fighting together and continue to joke about a picture one of them has of a woman in a provocative position. Once they are captured by the Germans the picture is taken away and they are laughed at. Then Roland Weary get to Luxemburg and see the way the other soldiers are being lined up by rank and they meet a dying colonel named Wild Bob. From there the story keeps going back and forth between the war and more present time for Billy Pilgrim.
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I really liked how you included the most random but still significant details in the story into your summary. At times the summary seem to jump around quite a bit but it all seems to come together. At the beginning you really get into the relationship of Bernard V. O'Hare and the narrator which was a great way to start. It grabbed my attention because it wasn't just facts but also included emotion and "why" O'Hare's wife was mad. Near the end you talk about how Roland Weary say how the soldiers were lined up by position but didn't say what that meant or why that was important. You could also go a bit more indepth about Wild Bob and what happened to him that made him important. All in all, the ideas you covered in your summary were important the beggining grabbed my attention.
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