Slaughterhouse-Five Summary | Chapterly
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut: A Complete Summary "So it goes." Overview Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death (1969) is Kurt Vonnegut's masterpiece -- a novel about World War II, the firebombing of Dresden, time travel, alien abduction, and the impossibility of writing an anti-war book. It follows Billy Pilgrim, an optometrist and World War II veteran who has "come unstuck in time," experiencing moments of his life in random, non-chronological order. One moment he is a prisoner of war in Dresden; the next he is a middle-aged man in Ilium, New York; the next he is on display in a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore. Vonnegut himself survived the firebombing of Dresden as a prisoner of war, sheltering in an underground slaughterhouse (Schlachthof-Fünf -- Slaughterhouse Five). He spent twenty-three years trying to write about the experience and concluded that a coherent narrative was impossible. The firebombing killed an estimated 25,000 to 135,000 people in a single night (the exact number remains disputed). There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. So Vonnegut wrote an incoherent narrative instead -- fractured, circular, punctuated by the refrain "So it goes" every time someone dies (which happens 106 times in...