Billy is the main character of Slaughterhouse-Five, but he's not exactly the hero of the book. Or rather, he doesn't have the heroic qualities usually associated with the main soldier in a story ab...

The narrator is—sorry to spoil it for you—pretty much Kurt Vonnegut. (Not that that's a bad thing: Vonnegut, as you can tell from reading this book, is awesome.) He talks from the first person...

If you can read this dude's name without snickering, you're way ahead of us. Kilgore. Trout. This character must have been mocked so hard in middle school.A Visionary... Without TalentKilgore Trout...

The what-now? Oh, we're glad you asked. These guys are aliens... who look like toilet plungers.Not Spielberg's Kind of E.T.The Tralfamadorians are the aliens who bring Billy to their planet to exhi...

Lazzar(psych)oPaul Lazzaro is the fake name of a real guy the narrator mentions in the first chapter, who "really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war" (1....

Barbara is Billy's daughter. In 1968, when Billy writes his letters about Tralfamadore to the local newspaper, she is only 21 and her mother has just died of carbon monoxide poisoning. The loss of...

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., like Bertram Copeland Rumfoord, actually appeared in a previous Vonnegut novel, called Mother Night (1961). Like Roland Weary, Campbell has this odd, invented identity for...

Mary O'Hare is the wife of the narrator's war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare. She is initially furious with the narrator because she thinks this great Dresden book he's writing is going to be a celebrati...

Eliot Rosewater is a captain in World War II. He winds up in the same veteran's hospital Billy checks himself into when he has his nervous breakdown before marrying Valencia. They both have had ter...

Wild Bob is an American colonel and prisoner along with Billy at the Luxembourg/German border. As he is extremely sick, he imagines that Billy is a member of his own regiment and gives him a very m...

The Englishmen are the first group of POWs the Americans meet when they are shipped from Luxembourg to a temporary prisoner camp in Germany. The Englishmen were captured early in the war and have b...

The British colonel is the head of the Englishmen in the POW compound Billy stops at before heading to Dresden. He is incredibly committed to hygiene and believes that once you lose interest in you...