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The story is told in a non-linear order, and events become clear through flashbacks and time travel experiences from the unreliable narrator. The narrator describes the stories of Billy Pilgrim, an American man from the fictional town of Ilium, New York who believes he was held in an alien zoo on the fictional planet of Tralfamadore and has experienced time travel.
As a chaplain's assistant in the United States Army during World War II, Billy is an ill-trained, disoriented, and fatalistic American soldier who finds he does not like war and refuses to fight.[3] He is captured in 1944 by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge. Billy nearly dies due to a string of events. Before he is captured, he meets left block Roland Weary, a patriot, warmonger, and sadistic bully who derides Billy's cowardice. When the two are captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has and force him to wear painful wooden clogs. Weary eventually succumbs to gangrene caused by wounds from the stiff clogs. While dying in a rail car full of prisoners, Weary convinces fellow soldier Paul Lazzaro that Billy is to blame for his death. Lazzaro vows to avenge Weary's death by killing Billy, because revenge is "the sweetest thing in life".
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At this moment, Billy becomes "unstuck in time" and has flashbacks from his former life. Billy and the other prisoners are transported by the Germans to Luxembourg. By 1945, the prisoners have arrived in the German city of Dresden to work in "contract labor" (forced labor). The Germans hold Billy and his fellow prisoners in an empty slaughterhouse called Schlachthof-fünf ("slaughterhouse five"). During the extensive bombing of Dresden by the Allies, German guards hide with the prisoners in the slaughterhouse, which is partially underground and well-protected from the damage on the surface. As a result, they are among the few survivors of the firestorm that rages in the city between February 13 and 15, 1945. After V-E Day in May 1945, Billy is transferred to the United States and receives his honorable discharge in July 1945.
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Soon, Billy is hospitalized with symptoms similar to post-traumatic stress disorder and placed under psychiatric care. There, he shares a room with Eliot Rosewater, who introduces Billy to the novels of the obscure science fiction author Kilgore Trout. After his release, Billy marries Valencia Merble, whose father owns the Ilium School of Optometry that Billy later attends. Billy becomes a successful and wealthy optometrist. In 1947, Billy and Valencia's first child, Robert, is born, and two years later their daughter Barbara is born. On Barbara's wedding night, Billy is captured by an alien spaceship and taken to a planet many light-years away from Earth called Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians are described as being able to see in four dimensions, simultaneously observing all points in the space-time continuum. They universally adopt a fatalistic worldview: death means nothing to them, and their common response to hearing about death is "so it goes".
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Player Piano is the first novel by American writer Kurt Vonnegut Jr., published in 1952. It depicts a dystopia of automation, describing the negative impact it can have on quality of life.[2] The story takes place in a near-future society that is almost totally mechanized, eliminating the need for human laborers. The widespread mechanization creates conflict between the wealthy upper class, the engineers and managers, who keep society running, and the lower class, whose skills and purpose in society have been replaced by machines. The book uses irony and sentimentality, which were to become hallmarks developed further in Vonnegut's later works.[2]
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The purpose of the two plotlines is to give two perspectives of the system: one from an insider who is emblematic of the system, and one from an outsider who is looking in on it. Paul, for all intents and purposes, is the living embodiment of what a man within the system should strive to be, and the Shah is a visitor from a very different culture and so applies a very different context to whatever he sees on his tour.
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The main plotline follows Paul's development from an uncritical cog in the system to one of its outspoken critics. Paul's father, George, was the first "National, Industrial, Commercial Communications, Foodstuffs, and Resources Director." George had almost complete control over the nation's economy and was more powerful than the President of the United States. Paul has inherited his father's reputation and social status but harbors a vague dissatisfaction with the industrial system and his contribution to society. His struggle with that unnameable distress is heightened when Ed Finnerty, an old friend whom Paul has always held in high regard, informs him he has quit his important engineering job in Washington, DC. Paul and Finnerty visit a bar in the "Homestead" section of town, where workers who have been displaced by machines live out their meaningless lives in mass-produced houses. There, they meet an Episcopal minister, Lasher, with a M.A. in anthropology, who puts into words the unfairness of the system that the two engineers have only vaguely sensed.
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The automation of industry and the effect that it has on society are the predominant themes of Player Piano. It is "a novel about people and machines, and machines frequently got the best of it, as machines will."[5] More specifically, it delves into a theme to which Vonnegut returns, "a problem whose queasy horrors will eventually be made world-wide by the sophistication of machines. The problem is this: How to love people who have no use."[6] Unlike much dystopian fiction, the novel's society was created by indifference, both of the populace and the technology that replaced it. As such, it is the sense of purposelessness of those living in a capitalistic society that has outgrown a need for them that must be rectified.[7]