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Billy's birth
Billy Pilgrim, is born in Ilium, New York. He attended one semester of optometry college before being drafted for WWII. -
Weary dies
Billy is back in the train car headed for Dresden. Roland Weary dies of gangrene. Billy meets Edgar Derby, who gets executed by firing squad in Dresden for looting a teapot from the ruins. -
Corpse mines
The "climax" of the story takes place during the very last few weeks of the war, and the second-to-last page in the book. Billy, the narrator, and the other POWs are rounded up by Germans again and marched back into Dresden with pickaxes and shovels to extract the bodies. The holes that they had made in the rubble were called "corpse mines." -
Unstuck in time
Billy, unfit for actual combat, is a chaplain's assistant for an Army regiment in Germany. His entire unit had been bombed, leaving only him alive. He joined three other similarly stranded soldiers and decides to stick with them. During his party's march back to the Allied front, he "becomes unstuck in time" for the first time, as he was leaning up against a tree. -
POW camp
Roland Weary is severely beating Billy, and is just about to break his spine, when they get discovered by Germans.The Germans loot them and escort them to a POW camp. The POWs are loaded onto a series of trains headed for Dresden, Germany. Billy falls asleep after being in a non-moving train car for two days and wakes up on the night of his abduction. -
Sniped
The war is nearly over. Lazzaro, tells Billy that Roland died because of him, and that Lazzaro was going to hire a hitman to shoot him for it. Billy remembers that is the way he dies, having witnessed his own death several times. He gets killed on February 13, 1976 during his speaking tour of Chicago on the Tralfamadorians and the truth of time. As soon as his speech ends, he gets sniped by a rifle, fired by Lazzaro's hitman. -
Billy leaves the war
Billy is honorably discharged from the military, returns to Ilium, and marries the daughter of the founder of the Ilium School of Optometry. -
Poo-tee-weet?
The book ends with Kurt Vonnegut's idea of the most intelligent thing that could ever be said about a massacre; Poo-tee-weet -
Tralfamadorians
Billy is abducted by Tralfamadorians. Knowing exactly when he'll be abducted, because he's already seen it before, he decides to watch a movie an hour before the abduction. The movie plays backward. After spending a few years on board the flying saucer, he has this conversation with one of the captors, which pretty much lays out the entire idea that there is no why. -
Caged
Inside the Tralfamadorian zoo, the human enclosure gets another resident: a movie star named Montana. She doesn't take the news of being abducted and put in a zoo nearly as well as Billy. -
"So it goes"
Billy is in a plane crash and is the only one that survives. KV says the phrase "so it goes" for the first time, while in the hospital, his wife dies of carbon monoxide.
