James Baquet

    Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (1922-2007) was a prolific American author, who wrote 14 novels and many other works over a span of 50 years. Of all these, none is more famous than his 1969 novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” which is in the top 20 of the 100 Greatest Novels of the 20th Century.

    The novel begins (after a first chapter that is more like a prologue, with the author speaking directly to the reader) with the provocative lines,

    “Listen:

    “Billy Pilgrim had come unstuck in time.

    “Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays random visits to all the events in between.

    “He says.”

    The central event of all this coming and going is the fire-bombing of Dresden in World War II, an event which Vonnegut himself experienced (as he tells us in the first chapter, which begins, “All this happened, more or less”). Pilgrim (and Vonnegut) had been held by the Germans as prisoners of war when the British and Americans bombed the city with both explosives and “incendiary devices,” bombs that were filled with materials that would burn on the ground for a long time, hence “fire-bombing.”

    The effect was, needless to say, horrific.

    But this is not mere autobiography. Despite the verisimilitude of Billy’s war experiences, he is also abducted by aliens to a planet called Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a zoo, and mated with another abductee, a Hollywood star with the unlikely name of Montana Wildhack, with whom Billy has a child before being whisked back to earth.

    Other characters from Vonnegut’s fictional universe also appear in the novel, including failed science fiction writer Kilgore Trout (perhaps another surrogate for Vonnegut) and Eliot Rosewater, an alcoholic philanthropist who is also a volunteer fireman. Likewise, Tralfamadore and its inhabitants show up in no fewer than four other Vonnegut works.

    Vocabulary:

    Which word above means:

    1. taken away quickly

    2. mentally deficient due to age

    3. able to make a fire

    4. one who has been kidnapped

    5. the appearance of truth

    6. a man whose wife has died

    7. a person who gives a lot of money to good causes

    8. productive, creating large quantities of work

    9. freed, loosened

    10. unpredictable, with no pattern