Slaughterhouse-Five

And then it developed that Campbell was not going to go unanswered after all. Poor old Derby, the doomed high school teacher, lumbered to his feet for what was probably the finest moment in his life. There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters.

Trout, incidentally, had written a book about a money tree. It had twenty-dollar bills for leaves. Its flowers were government bonds. Its fruit was diamonds. It attracted human beings who killed each other around the roots and made very good fertilizer.
So it goes.

“There are no telegrams on Tralfamadore. But you’re right: each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message – describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other. There isn’t any particular relationship between all the messages, except that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time.”

American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, a few German planes flew at them backward, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. . . The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes. The containers were stored neatly in racks. The Germans below had miraculous devices of their own, which were long steel tubes. They used them to suck more fragments from the crewmen and planes. But there were still a few wounded Americans, though, and some of the bombers were in bad repair. Over France, though, German fighters came up again, and made everything and everybody as good as new

We'd picked up this batch from the mass grave, in the woods, and stood waiting by the van on the approach road while the carbon monoxide went about its work. All my men were dressed as doctors . . . waiting for the familiar volley of shouts and thumps from within . . . . We then drove them closer to town, where one of our men was readying the piles of clothes. Out they all filed. Among them was a mother and a baby, both naked, naturally, for now. The baby was weeping in a determined, muscular, long-haul rhythm, probably from earache. We then escorted this group of thirty souls into a low warehouse littered with primitive sewing machines and spindles . . . These Jews, led by the weeping baby, made their solemn way past a series of curtains and blankets and, one by one, backed their way through a missing panel in the wall. This panel I myself replaced with a softly spoken "Guten Tag." I don't know. I was moved, by their continued silence, by the baby's muffled cries. "Raus! Raus!" I shouted—to the men who romped off to explore the perimeter and to lay out some trinkets, and some food, some bread and tomatoes, say, as was traditional for the Jews later use.