Roland Weary yearns to be avenged, and again and again in his delirium, he divulges the name of the person who killed him: Billy Pilgrim.
On the tenth night, the train arrives at a prison camp, and guards force the prisoners out of the boxcars.
The narrator describes two of the prisoners: Edgar Derby, a former high school teacher in Indianapolis, and Paul Lazzaro, who was in the same boxcar with Weary and promised him that he would make Billy pay for Weary's death.
The orange-and-black tent used for Barbara's wedding ceremony recalls the orange-and-black banners on the train transporting the POWs.
On the trip to Tralfamadore, Billy asks for something to read. After reading the only Earthling novel onboard, he is given some Tralfamadorian books. Unable to read the alien language, he is surprised that the books' tiny text is laid out in brief knots of symbols separated by stars. He is told that the clumps of symbols are like telegrams — short, urgent messages. Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the other; there is no beginning, no middle, no end. There are no causes, no effects.
As the saucer enters a time warp, Billy is hurled back into his childhood: He is twelve years old. With his father and mother, he is visiting the Grand Canyon.
Suddenly, he finds himself back in 1945 Germany. He and his fellow POWs are marched to a shed, where a one-armed, one-eyed corporal writes their names and serial numbers in a ledger. Now the prisoners are legally alive — moments before, they were missing in action.
That night in the Englishmen's compound, the English officers perform a musical version of Cinderella. Watching it, Billy begins to laugh hysterically, and then he begins to shriek. He continues shrieking until he is carried out of the shed to the hospital, where he is tied down in bed and given a shot of morphine.
The morphine triggers another time trip, this time to spring 1948. Billy finds himself in a New York veterans' hospital.
Billy meets a former infantry captain named Eliot Rosewater who introduces him to Science Fiction Novels by Kilgore Trout.
In a split second, Billy is flung back to 1945 before being hurled ahead once more to the veterans' hospital. Billy's mother is visiting him; when she leaves, Valencia Merble, Billy's fiancée, sits with him.
Billy time trips again, and this time he travels to the Tralfamadore zoo, where he is confined in a geodesic dome.
The Tralfamadorians furnish Billy with a mate named Montana Wildhack, a pornographic motion picture star on Earth. He makes no attempts to entice her affections, but within a week she asks him to sleep with her. After Billy makes love to Montana, he travels through time and space back to his home in Ilium.
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