Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five was published in 1969, when its author was in his forties and the war it describes was twenty-five years behind him. Kurt Vonnegut had served as an American infantry scout in the Second World War, was taken prisoner, and was held in Dresden during the Allied firebombing; he worked on the book for years before finishing it. The full title is Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death, and the book's first chapter is a first-person account of a novelist trying to write it.

The novel's structure is the argument. Billy Pilgrim does not travel through time because of a machine; the narrative simply moves between periods of his life, so that the death of a soldier in 1945 and the death of a man in 1976 sit on the same page. The Tralfamadorians give Billy a philosophy in which moments are permanent and death is only one moment among many, which is precisely the comfort the book refuses to settle for, since the same aliens destroyed the universe in an accident they knew was coming.

Vonnegut's prose is short, flat and deliberately ungrieving, and the recurring phrase about things simply being the way they are has become the most quoted line in his work. The book was banned in some American schools and libraries for its language, its sex and its politics, a fight that has followed it for decades; it is also the novel that made Vonnegut famous and is usually the first one recommended to a reader who has not tried him.