1. What do we learn from the title page? What do you think the novel is going to be about? Actually the title hints at the four main settings or realms in which the novel takes place, four times and places for the plot to develop. Can you figure out what these four strands are?

2. What ideas and images begin to be repeated as you move from the title page through the dedication and epigraph to the beginning of the book? These repeated ideas and images (as well as repeated words and phrases) help you identify major THEMES in the book. Major themes introduced in the first chapter which extend through the whole novel include:

3. "All this really happened, more or less." -- What is the point of telling us right at the beginning what happens at the end and also of undercutting the literal truth of the story he is telling?

4. "If the accident will." -- What does this mean? Who or what usually wills things? Does this connect up in any way with the limmerick which follows? What is the point of the limmerick anyway? What do these two passages tell us about the author's views on life, war, and God? Why does this phrase lead Vonnegut to dedicate the book to Gerhard Muller?

5. Why anti-glacier? How is war like a glacier?

6. What do the stories about the Eiffel Tower andthe man in the elevator with the wedding ring have to in common? What is Vonnegut sying here about materialistic value systems?

7. As an anthropology major, Vonnegut learned that there are no such things as villans. What does he think about heroes? Whatis Mary O'Hare's attitude towards heroes? As you move into the book you will need to think about whether Billy Pilgrim is a hero and whether there are characters who could be called villans.

8. Why does Vonnegut love Lot's wife? What does being "human" mean to him?