Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade

Vonnegut's wildly imaginative, witty and affecting novel tells Billy Pilgrim's story in just that fashion. It spins back and forth through time, layering in the elements of Billy's life, which begins, chronologically, in 1922 in the upstate New York town of Ilium, and ends over 50 years later, when he is a successful middle-class optometrist with a wife and two grown children. Like Vonnegut himself, Billy was a World War II draftee and a prisoner of war in Dresden when the Allies firebombed the city early in 1945. All of these facts are significant, and the novel emerges as a powerful anti-war