I read this long ago, but needed a refresher. It's clear that many of the events that Vonnegut experienced in World War 2 were incorporated into this novel, especially when he and other American soldiers were captured by the Germans and shipped to Dresden to be used as labor in the beautiful, culturally significant city that was said to have no military value. Despite that, after a month, the Americans and English firebombed the city, killing 135,000 people and turning the city into an ashy moon-like wreck. The American prisoners of war survived only because they were based in an underground meat locker of a slaughterhouse, Slaughterhouse Five, to be exact.
The story revolves around a man named Billy Pilgrim, who, like Vonnegut, also fought in the war and experienced this horrific event. What's different about Billy is that long after the war, Billy says he was kidnapped by an alien people called Tralfamadorians, and taken to live in a zoo-like enclosure on their planet. This is when Billy becomes unstuck in time. When he isn't on Tralfamadore, he lives in Ilium, New York, as an optometrist, married to the daughter of the optometry's school's president. Lots of snippets of Billy's life unfold in a non-linear manner, indicative of the time travel he experiences, visiting and re-visiting times in both the past and future. He learns that the Tralfamadorians don't understand humans' concern with death. They think that that there are some bad moments, but there are a lot of other moments that are not bad. All moments have always existed, and there's nothing that can be done to change them. Billy is told that of all the inhabited planets Tralfamadorians have studied, only Earthlings believe in free will.
Terrible story about coping with war, told in an entertainingly wry way...
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