SlaughterhouseFive

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dominated (sometimes published with the subtitle The Children's Crusade) is a 1969 anti-war novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It follows Billy Pilgrim, an unremarkable American optometrist and World War II soldier, who becomes unstuck in time and moves through a nonlinear sequence of moments from his life. The narrative blends satirical realism with science fiction as Billy is abducted by the alien Tralfamadorians, who perceive time as a fixed four-dimensional reality.

A central thread centers on the Allied bombing of Dresden in 1945, an event that Vonnegut himself survived as a prisoner of war. After the war, Billy experiences episodes from his life out of chronological order, including his time in the army, his marriage, and his captivity on Tralfamadore, where he is exhibited in a zoo with a movie star, Montana Wildhack. The novel repeatedly returns to the Tralfamadorian view of existence, insisting that all moments exist simultaneously and that people should adopt a fatalistic acceptance of death, often signaled by the refrain “So it goes.”

Slaughterhouse-Five employs metafictional devices and a spare, sardonic style to critique war, memory, and free will. It was published by Delacorte Press in 1969 and won the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970. The work has become a touchstone of postwar American literature and a staple of many school curricula, though it has faced challenges and bans in some districts for its language and subject matter. It was adapted into a 1972 film directed by George Roy Hill.