Slaughterhouse-Five

Imagine a guy named Billy who gets 'unstuck in time' like skipping around a DVD—sometimes he's a scared kid soldier in World War II hiding in a smelly meat house during a huge city bombing, sometimes he's grown up with a fancy wife and kids, and sometimes aliens kidnap him to their zoo on another planet to teach him that time is like a big picture where everything happens at once and nobody can change it. The book shows how war is super dumb and hurts everyone forever, but Billy learns to say 'so it goes' for every sad thing, like when people die, and just accept life's crazy jumps without getting too mad.

Slaughterhouse-Five, subtitled 'The Children's Crusade,' follows Billy Pilgrim, a mild-mannered optometrist and World War II veteran who becomes 'unstuck in time,' reliving moments from his life in random order—from his traumatic POW experiences during the Battle of the Bulge and the apocalyptic firebombing of Dresden in 1945, where he shelters in a slaughterhouse meat locker, to his postwar suburban life in Ilium, New York, his plane crash, and bizarre abductions by the Tralfamadorian aliens. These four-eyed extraterrestrials from the planet Tralfamadore hold a zoo-like view of humanity, exhibiting Billy in a geodesic dome habitat alongside a former pornographic star, Montana Wildhack, while imparting their philosophy that time is a static landscape where all moments coexist eternally, rendering death and free will illusions. Kurt Vonnegut, who inserts himself as the narrator drawing from his own Dresden survival, employs a fragmented, non-linear structure and repetitive refrain 'So it goes'—appended to every mention of death—to satirize the absurdity of war, the myth of American heroism, and human pretensions. The novel critiques glorification of violence through grotesque characters like the vengeful Paul Lazzaro and delusional propagandist Howard W. Campbell Jr., while exploring post-traumatic stress, fatalism, and stoic resignation, blending dark humor, science fiction, and autobiography into a profound anti-war lament that affirms life's unchanging, tragic beauty.