Slaughterhouse-Five

Billy Pilgrim is an American optometrist who has come unstuck in time, a condition that lets him slip without warning among the days of his own life: his boyhood in Ilium, New York, his capture by German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge, and a night decades later when a hired gunman named Paul Lazzaro shoots him dead on a lecture stage. Vonnegut follows Billy through his war service out of order, building toward his imprisonment in an actual Dresden slaughterhouse building numbered five, where he and a handful of other American prisoners survive the Allied firebombing of the city by sheltering underground while tens of thousands of people above them do not. Billy also insists, calmly and repeatedly, that he was abducted by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore and displayed in a zoo there beside a former film star named Montana Wildhack. The Tralfamadorians experience every moment of time as permanently existing at once, so death is never truly an ending to them, only a bad moment among countless good ones elsewhere, a philosophy Billy adopts and repeats every time someone dies in the book with the same flat refrain, so it goes. He comes home, marries Valencia Merble, prospers as an optometrist, and eventually goes on the radio to describe Tralfamadore, worrying his own daughter for his sanity. The novel circles back to Dresden in 1945, the war just ended, birds talking nonsense over the wrecked city, offering no resolution beyond the plain fact that Billy survived what he never stopped reliving.

Vonnegut breaks the book's chronology on purpose, and reading it means giving up on cause following effect the way a conventional war novel promises; a paragraph can leap from Billy's honeymoon to his death without transition. It reads quickly, in short blunt sentences and even shorter chapters, funny in a way that keeps undercutting itself, and the repeated so it goes turns from a joke into something closer to a wince the longer the book goes on. Vonnegut appears as himself in the opening and closing chapters, explaining that he spent twenty three years trying to write about surviving the Dresden bombing and only managed it once he let the book's structure fall apart on purpose rather than force the events into a straight line.