Slaughterhouse-Five is the story of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW who becomes “unstuck in time,” experiencing all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously. Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history—sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness—as he struggles to find purpose, order, or meaning to his own existence and to that of humanity.

Published on March 31, 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children’s Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW, much like Vonnegut did. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming “unstuck in time.”