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Slaughterhouse-Five; or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. One of his most popular works and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device. The bombing of Dresden in World War II, the aftermath of which Vonnegut witnessed, is the starting point.

Plot summary:

A disoriented and ill-trained American soldier named Billy Pilgrim is captured by German soldiers during the Battle of the Bulge. Trained as a Chaplain's assistant, he arrives in Belgium just as his unit is overwhelmed by the Germans. There is not enough time to issue him with combat gear. He and other prisoners are sent far from the front to live in a makeshift prison, a disused slaughterhouse in the city of Dresden. During air raids the prisoners and their guards take shelter in a deep cellar, originally built to keep meat cool. Because of this shelter they are among the few survivors of the firestorm which consumes the city after an air raid.

Billy has become "unstuck in time" for unexplained reasons (though it's hinted towards the end that his surviving a plane crash left him with mild brain damage). He meets, and is later kidnapped by, aliens from the planet Tralfamadore, who exhibit him in a Tralfamadorian zoo with Montana Wildhack, a pornographic movie star. The Tralfamadorians see in four dimensions, the fourth dimension being time. Tralfamadorians have seen every instant of their lives already; they believe that they can't choose to change anything about their fate, but can choose to focus on any moment in their lives that they wish.

Throughout the novel, Billy hops back and forth in time, reliving various occasions in his life and fantasy life; this gives him a constant sense of stage fright, as he never knows what part of his life is coming up next. He spends time on Tralfamadore; in Dresden; numbly wading through deep snow in WWII Germany before his capture; living married in America after the war; up to the moment of his murder on Earth many years later. By the time of his murder, Billy has adopted Tralfamadorian fatalism, which has given him great personal peace; he has spread this philosophy to millions of humans and has become a popular public figure on Earth.

Billy's fatalism appears to be grounded in reality (at least in the reality which Billy perceives); after noting that Billy had a copy of the Serenity Prayer in his office, the narrator says, "Among the things Billy Pilgrim could not change were the past, the present, and the future." One of his Tralfamadorian captors, who seems sympathetic to humans, says that out of 31 inhabited planets it has visited, "only on Earth is there any talk of free will."

The book examines many events in Billy's life, including the death of his wife, his capture by the Nazis in World War II, and the infamous bombing of Dresden that was the inspiration for the book. Although the narrative of Billy's time in Dresden anchors the book, a major secondary theme is his easy and affluent life as an optometrist in the city of Illium, New York (Vonnegut's fictional stand-in for Troy, New York) which contrasts sharply with both his war experience, and with the life he knew before the war in what was post-Depression America. This also parallels Vonnegut's own transition from the dismal years of the 1930's to, as he describes it, a life where he is "fabulously well-to-do". In a sense this further parallels the experiences of many Americans of the time, for whom the post-war period was one of great and to some extent unexpected affluence.

The novel uses certain phrases repetitively, such as "so it goes"—which, used whenever death or dying is mentioned (be it that of a man, an animal, or the bubbles in champagne), serves to downplay mortality, making it routine and even humorous—and "mustard gas and roses", to denote the horrible odor of a rotting corpse or a drunk's breath.

Billy's death is the result of a strange string of events. After his unit is overrun in Belgium, Billy wanders the woods wearing only a light jacket and ordinary shoes. Suffering from hypothermia he meets Roland Weary, a soldier carrying prodigious amounts of equipment and wearing so much clothing he barely notices the winter cold. Rather than share with Billy, Weary makes it his cause to keep Billy alive despite his pathetic appearance and willingness to lie down and die. He spends the time until they are captured threatening and cajoling Billy. After they are captured, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him clogs to wear. He eventually dies of gangrene from injuries to his feet caused by the clogs.

Because Weary blames Billy for his capture (and eventual death), Weary's morbid friend Paul Lazzaro vows to have him killed, as, according to him, revenge is "the sweetest thing in life." Billy, who travels in time, already knows where and how he will be killed: Lazzaro shoots him after a public speaking event in a future where the United States has been balkanized. During Billy's public speech he declares that following his lecture he will be killed, so he uses this fact to convey his message that because time is another dimension all three-dimensional slices as we know them exist simultaneously. Therefore, everyone is always alive and death is not a tragic event.