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Short Story Of Edgar Derby

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4. Billy can’t sleep as it is his daughter’s wedding night and because he is unstuck in time, he knows that he will soon be kidnapped by the Tralfamadorians. Waiting for them to come he watches a war movie which goes forwards then backwards due to him being unstuck in time. He finally goes out to meet the ship, and is abducted. As the ship leaves earth Billy returns to 1944. Back in the boxcar, none of the men want Billy to sleep next to them because he yells and thrashes in his sleep so he is forced to sleep while standing. In another car, Weary dies of gangrene in his feet and as he slowly dies he asks that someone get revenge for him on the man who caused his death (Billy Pilgrim). The train arrives at the camp which is full of dying …show more content…
The Americans are all given coats and go into a delousing station, where all of the men are stripped. Billy has one of the worst bodies there, both skinny and weak, and is berated by a German soldier. We are introduced to Edgar Derby and Paul Lazarro. Derby is the oldest POW there. He is a high school teacher from Indianapolis and is physically sturdy despite his age. Paul Lazarro is a car thief from Illinois who is even weaker than Billy's. He was in Roland Weary's boxcar, and had vowed solemnly to him that he would find and kill Billy. When the scalding water turns on, Billy jumps back to infancy. His mother has just finished bathing him and he then leaps forward to a Sunday game of golf, played with three other optometrists. He leaps again in time back to the space ship, on his first trip to Tralfamadore. He converses with one of the aliens and comments that they do not seem to believe in free will. The alien replies that in all of the life in the galaxy, Earth is the only one whose people believe in the …show more content…
He is also the man who introduces Billy to the author Kilgore Trout. Billy leaps back to the POW camp once again where a British colonel is talking to Derby. Billy leaps back to the hospital. He is being visited by his ugly, overweight fiancée Valencia whom he does not want to marry. She is a diamond engagement ring that Billy had found while in Germany. He leaps forward in time to the zoo on Tralfamadore, where he was on display naked. He answers questions asked by Tralfamadorian tourists and learns that they have 5 different genders but the difference can only be seen in the fourth dimension. He is also told that on earth there are 7 sexes and that once again the differences can only be viewed in the 4th dimension. These concepts confound Billy. Billy also expects that the Tralfamadorians will be concerned about the wars on earth. And he worries that humans will eventually threaten the galaxy. The Tralfamadorians do not worry however because they already know that the universe will end during and experiment into new fuel. They know that they cannot prevent it. Billy comes to the conclusion that trying to prevent wars on Earth is futile and learns that the Tralfamadorians also have war, but choose to

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