Slaughterhouse Five Three Awards for

Slaughterhouse Five Three Awards for Slaughterhouse Five Award 1: A scrapbook for Billy Pilgrim Billy Pilgrim is described as a character unstuck in time. His memory serves as the narrative structure of Slaughterhouse Five, a series of memories that occurs after Billy is in a plane accident. At the time of the accident, Billy is employed as an eye doctor in upstate New York.

Billy has a wife, children, and comfortable life, but he is haunted by memories of his captivity during World War II, and digging out from his imprisonment in a work camp during the bombing of Dresden. Rather than finding comfort in material success and his physical survival, he is disenchanted with his current existence. He dreams as well that he is captured by aliens, who underline the principle that human beings have no free will, evidently reflecting Billy's sense of powerlessness over the actions that have shaped his life.

Because Billy has been able to exert so little control over others in his past, he feels that it is impossible for human beings to change their lives, and everything is fated. Billy feels he could not change the fact he would marry woman he does not love or find attractive, for example, anymore than he could object to fighting in a war.

The scrapbook honors Billy's most significant action in the novel -- the act of remembering (and dreaming) the entire sequence of events, because without Billy's memory and strange fantasies there would be no Slaughterhouse Five. A scrapbook contains pictures and other memorabilia that cannot be changed, just like how Billy sees the past. But like memory, the order of a scrapbook can also be rearranged and reinterpreted in the present.

People try to impose a rational order upon the past, and often arrange a scrapbook from past to present, but because you can open the book and be confronted with a disconnected event, opening a scrapbook demonstrates unstable nature of memory. You can also insert new photos or scraps that will change the story shown in the scrapbook.

Award 2: A pencil with an eraser for the narrator The narrator, a thinly disguised Kurt Vonnegut is a historian and a writer, trying to create a true-life account of the narrator's life during the war. The narrator interviews his old friend and war compatriot Bernard in search of facts, but the contrast between Vonnegut as a character (as opposed to the 'real' author Vonnegut) and Vonnegut the author shows the limits of factual narrative to truly encompass the emotional fallout of the war.

The narrator decides that to write a purely factual account of the events of the war is impossible. Also, Bernard's wife Mary states that she fears creating a novel about the war will romanticize the event, and war in general, particularly given the fact that Vietnam is raging in the background, a war that Billy's son Robert will eventually fight in as a U.S. Marine.

The award for the narrator, a pencil with an eraser, shows the mutable nature of memory, and how words can always be changed and altered to suit the purposes of others. The failed quest of Vonnegut the character underlines another important theme of the novel -- although life may seem 'fated' as Pilgrim perceives it to be, our own perceptions affect how we see our past and reconstruct the past. Our minds are erasers, always writing and rewriting events. Our perception of time is highly personalized.

For example, Vonnegut the character is surprised that his old friend Bernard has changed over the years, and is no longer the young, hard-drinking man he knew in his youth. Vonnegut the character appears in some of Pilgrim's reminisces as a peripheral character, but the reader is never certain how much he or she should trust this strange figure, who speaks with so much authority about how Billy Pilgrim is feeling.

Award 3: A trip around the world for Valencia Pilgrim Valencia's award, of course, would require her to get a reprieve from her untimely death while visiting her husband. Valencia is one of the saddest characters in the novel. She loves her husband, even though he regards her as overweight and unattractive. She spends most of her life devoted to making a happy home and making life pleasant for her husband and children, even though her husband shares very little of his real, inner turmoil with her.

She does now know how much emotional damage Billy suffered after the wartime bombing. She drowns her sorrows in overeating, and both her husband and the narrator seem to regard her as a figure of fun, rather than a fully-fledged human being. Valencia dies on the way to visit her husband, after Billy is in the plane crash that precipitates the flurry of memories.