Slaughterhouse-Five - Characters

Characters

Narrator

Intrusive and anonymous, recurring as a minor character, and as Kurt Vonnegut, himself, when the narrator says: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

The narrator begins the story describing his connection to the fire-bombing of Dresden, and his reasons for writing Slaughterhouse-Five.

Billy Pilgrim

A fatalistic optometrist ensconced in a dull, safe marriage, in Ilium, New York. He randomly travels in time and is abducted by aliens from planet Tralfamadore, who see everything in the fourth dimension. In World War II he was a POW in Dresden, which has a lasting effect on his post-war life. His time travel occurs at desperate times in his life; he re-lives events past and future, and becomes fatalistic (though not a defeatist) because he has seen when, how, and why he will die.

Roland Weary

A weak man dreaming of grandeur and obsessed with gore and vengeance, who saves Billy several times (despite Billy's protests) in hopes of military glory, but then gets them captured, leading to the loss of his winter uniforms and boots. Weary dies of gangrene in the train en route to the POW camp and blames Billy in his dying words.

Paul Lazzaro

Another POW. A sickly, ill-tempered car thief from Cicero, Illinois, who takes Weary's dying words as a revenge commission to kill Billy. He keeps a mental list of his enemies, claiming he can have anyone "killed for a thousand dollars plus traveling expenses".

Kilgore Trout

A failed science fiction writer who makes money by managing newspaper delivery boys and has received only one fan letter (from Eliot Rosewater; see below). After Billy meets him in a back alley in Ilium, New York, he invites Trout to his wedding anniversary celebration. There, Kilgore follows Billy, thinking the latter has seen through a "time window" (when he inexplicably becomes saddened by the barbershop quartet, later revealed as due to them reminding him of the four German guards trying and failing to vocalise the news of Dresden's destruction). Kilgore Trout is also a main character in Vonnegut's novel Breakfast of Champions.

Edgar Derby

A middle-aged man who has pulled strings to be able to fight in the war. He was a high school teacher who felt that he couldn't just let his young students go off to war without himself also fighting. He is a fellow POW to Billy and Paul Lazzaro, and the only one who stands up to the traitor Howard W. Campbell, Jr. and defends American ideals. Though he appears to be unimportant throughout most of the book, he seems to be the only American before the bombing of Dresden to understand what war can do to people. German forces summarily execute him for looting a teapot after the Allied fire-bombing of Dresden. Though it seems not to be the most pivotal death in the book, Vonnegut declares that this death is the climax of the book as a whole.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr.

An American Nazi. Before the War, he lived in Germany as a successful, famous, German-language playwright, and became a Nazi propagandist. In an essay, he connects the misery of American poverty to the disheveled appearance and behaviour of the American POWs. Edgar Derby confronts and challenges him when he tries to recruit American POWs into the American Free Corps to fight the Communist Russians on behalf of the Nazis. Campbell is the protagonist of an earlier Vonnegut novel, Mother Night, in which he is revealed to have been working for the OSS against the Germans, using his pro-Nazi persona as a cover. The Americans never reveal Campbell's true role after the end of the war, forcing him to lead a life of anonymity to avoid the disgrace. Eventually, Campbell surrenders himself to Israeli authorities, and hangs himself while in their custody.

Valencia Merble

Billy's obese wife and mother of their two children, Robert and Barbara. Billy is emotionally distant from her. She dies from carbon monoxide poisoning after an automobile accident en route to the hospital to see Billy after his airplane crash.

Robert Pilgrim

Son of Billy and Valencia. A troubled, middle-class boy, and disappointing son, who so absorbs the anti-Communist world view, he metamorphoses from suburban adolescent rebel to Green Beret sergeant.

Barbara Pilgrim

Daughter of Billy and Valencia. She is a "bitchy flibbertigibbet", from having had to assume the family's leadership at the age of twenty. She has "legs like an Edwardian grand piano," marries an optometrist, and treats her widower father as a childish invalid.

Tralfamadorians

The extraterrestrial race who appear (to humans) like upright toilet plungers with a hand atop, in which is set a single, yellow eye. They abduct Billy and teach him about time's relation to the world, as a fourth dimension, fate, and death's indiscriminate nature. Tralfamadorians appear in several Vonnegut novels. In Slaughterhouse Five, they reveal that the universe will be accidentally destroyed by one of their test pilots.

Montana Wildhack

A model who stars in a film shown in a pornographic bookstore when Billy stops by to check out the Kilgore Trout novels sitting in the window. She also appears on the cover of multiple magazines in the store. She is also abducted and placed in Billy's habitat on Tralfamadore, where they have sex and produce a child.

"Wild Bob"

A superannuated Army officer Billy met in the war. He is delirious and eventually dies of a fever. He tells the POWs to call him "Wild Bob", he thinks them his command, the 451st Infantry Regiment. "If you're ever in Cody, Wyoming, ask for Wild Bob," is an inspirational phrase of his that Billy repeats to himself. He was based on William Joseph Cody Garlow (grandson of the famed Buffalo Bill Cody) who surrendered his unit to the German forces during the Battle of the Bulge.

Eliot Rosewater

A friend whom Billy meets in the veteran's hospital and who introduces him to the science fiction novels of Kilgore Trout (see above). Rosewater turns out to be the writer of the only fan letter Trout ever received. Rosewater, like Billy, has experienced a horrifying event in the war. The two feel that the Kilgore Trout novels they read help them to deal with the trauma of World War II. Eliot Rosewater also shows up in other books by Kurt Vonnegut, such as God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Bertram Copeland Rumfoord

A Harvard history professor, retired Air Force brigadier general and millionaire, who shares a hospital room with Billy and is interested in the Dresden bombing. He is almost surely a relative of Winston Niles Rumfoord, a character in a previous novel by Vonnegut, The Sirens of Titan.

The Scouts

Two American infantry scouts trapped behind German lines who found Roland and, later on, Billy. Although Roland considers himself and the scouts to be best friends and heroes (calling their group the "Three Musketeers"), the scouts are uncomfortable around him and later reveal that Roland is slowing them down as much as Billy, and abandon them both. Later on it is discovered that they were found and shot from behind by German troops while waiting in ambush.

Mary O'Hare

The character briefly talked about in the beginning who Vonnegut promised to name the book The Children's Crusade.

Werner Gluck

Werner is a sixteen-year-old German charged with guarding Billy and Edgar Derby when they first arrive at Slaughterhouse-Five in Dresden. He does not know his way around, and as he tries to find the kitchen he accidentally leads them into a communal shower where some German refugee girls from the Eastern Front are bathing. There are comments made on how similar in appearance Billy and him are and, as it goes, they, coincidently, end up being 'distant cousins, something they never out'.