Billy Pilgrim Sparknotes

Vonnegut starts off by writing a novel about his experiences with the war and the bombing of Dresden. After he completed the novel about war, he then starts writing a novel about Billy Pilgrim. Billy was born and raised in Ilium, New York. He becomes an optometrist and gets drafted. After the war, he enrolls in optometry school again and gets engaged to Valencia during his senior year. Billy experiences a mild nervous collapse and gets admitted to a veteran's hospital near Lake Placid. He gets discharged after he healed and marries Valenica. On a flight to a convention in Montreal, he gets into a plane crash and starts talking about another planet called Tralfalmadore. Everyone assumes his delusions were the result of the plane crash and his
daughter tries to convince him to stop. Billy time travels back to the war alongside his war buddy, Roland Weary. He time travels to when he was forty one at the nursing home visiting his mother and time travels back to the war. The troops left them and Roland accuses Billy for it.
The Germans find them, capture them, and take Roland's shoes. He time travels to when he is examining a patient and goes back to World War Two in a blink of an eye. The Germans are taking Billy and Roland to the prisoner camp, and Billy travels back to the Ilium Lions Club where they are discussing the war. After falling asleep, Billy finds himself back in the war. The Germans are transferring the prisoners by train. He goes back to Ilium and gets abducted by Tralfalmadorians. He questions why this had to happen to him, and the Tralfamadorians tell him that it is sealed by fate. Suddenly, he's back in Dresden at a new prison camp. The prisoners get settled in and are billeted in with the British officials. Billy gets sedated and wakes up in a mental hospital, which he has admitted himself to. He befriends a veteran named Eliot Rosewater who spends his days reading Kilgore Trout novels. Billy travels to a Tralfamadore zoo that he has been enslaved in. The Tralfamadorians inform him that the universe will end because a Tralfamadorian test pilot will accidentally press a button that makes the whole universe disappear. Billy zips to his wedding night and back to the war where many soldiers are being
hospilized. He goes back to when his daughter is taking care of him in his eccentric state and the Tralfamadorian zoo where he is being assigned a mate, Montana Wildback. Billy transports back to the prison camp where they are about to be moved to Dresden. Paul Lazzaro makes a vow to avenge Roland Weary's death and carry out his promise to kill Billy. Billy already knows he will be murdered by Lazzaro from time traveling to that moment. He travels back to the plane crash in Vermont after the war and gets rushed into surgery. During his state of unconsciousness after the surgery, Billy dreams about the time he worked for a molasses factory where all the workers lived in poverty and secretly ate the molasses.