In the midwestern town of Midland City, Indiana, wealthy car dealer and widower Dwayne Hoover exists on the rim of insanity—but it will take an obscure and impoverished science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout to push Dwayne over the edge.
After being invited to the Midland City Arts Festival as their guest of honor, Trout debates whether to accept. Once he decides to go, he first hitchhikes to New York City to find copies of his novels. Trout hates his own books to much that he keeps none at home. He intends to embarrass the organizers and attendees of the festival by reading his lowbrow stories.
After being abducted, beaten, and robbed in New York, Trout hitchhikes his way to Midland City. All the while, Hoover grows more unstable. He becomes argumentative, insulting, and isolated. Filthy and haggard, Trout arrives at the Midland City Holiday Inn—also owned by Hoover—and takes a seat in the lounge where pretentious guests of the festival clash with a few of the locals. Ignoring all of this, Hoover sits alone in a corner lost in his own deranged thoughts and ignoring his estranged homosexual son, Bunny, the lounge piano player.
When the bartender turns on the black lights in the lounge, his jacket glows a brilliant white, as does the waitress’s outfit—and Kilgore Trout’s shirt. Beguiled by this, Hoover approaches Trout, resting his chin on the writer’s shoulder and demanding the answer to life. He snatches up a copy of Trout’s novel, Now It Can Be Told, and speed reads it on the spot. After which, all hell breaks loose.
Throughout the story, told in third-person omniscient, Vonnegut observes the events with his trademark razor wit and dry humor, reminding the reader that he is the creator of this story, explaining some of his decisions, and veering off on hilarious tangents.
The above summary is about one-fifth of what happens in this surreal satire that addresses themes of sex, pollution, racism, mental health, desperation, success, and hypocrisy complete with illustrations drawn by the author.
This sardonic anti-war tale begins with Billy Pilgrim’s return to Dresden, Germany after WWII where he was a POW during the infamous firebombing. Throughout the story, it becomes evident that Billy suffers from PTSD and depression as he travels back and forth in time, experiencing fragments of his life involving terrible hardship and death. So it goes. To cope, he creates a fictional planet called Tralfamadore where claims to have been taken to become an exhibit in a zoo for the entertainment of the Tralfamadorians. And of course, Billy enjoys the science fiction novels of one obscure and loathed writer named Kilgore Trout.
The wealthiest Hollywood playboy in America, Malachi Constant, is invited to the home of Beatrice Rumfoord to witness the manifestation of her husband, Winston Niles Rumfoord, and his dog Kazak. Nine years before, Rumfoord had piloted his spaceship into an uncharted chrono-synclastic infundibulum near Mars. Kazak was his only companion aboard ship. Since then, man and dog exist as energy but materialize on a regular schedule in his mansion on Earth. Word of Winston’s materializations have spread over time and now draw a crowd outside the mansion’s walls. His wife, however, permits no audience to Winston’s appearances—until he specifically requests the presence of Malachi Constant.
A writer named Jonah (or possibly John) looks back on his adventures, and his conversion to a religion known as Bokononism, while conducting research for a book about the late Frank Hoenikker, one of the fathers of the atomic bomb. The first leg of our hero’s journey takes him to Hoenikker’s hometown of Ilium, NY where he meets two of Hoenikker’s three adult children. There, Jonah learns that each of the children possesses a piece of Ice-Nine, a dangerous substance their father developed for the military.