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Slaughterhouse-Five is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World Conflict II veteran and POW that has, in the later stage of his life, become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes all together. Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at that time he previously been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and record, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's common large cast of continuing personas (notably here the hack technology fiction article writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there surely is no causation, no order, no motive to existence). The "unstuck" characteristics of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early on novelistic use of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder; then again, Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him. Desperate for some goal, order, or indicating to his living and humanity's, Pilgrim fulfills the beauteous and incomprehensible Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her, and drifts on some supernal aircraft, finally, where Kilgore Trout, the Tralfamadorians, Montana Wildhack, and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but instead disperse through all planes of living. Slaughterhouse-Five was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Prize and a best retailer, and remains four decades later as classic and shattering a conflict fiction as Catch-22, with which it stands as the two signal novels of these riotous and furious decade.
