So it goes….

Slaughterhouse Five : Kurt Vonnegut
This book is widely regarded as one of the best anti war novels of all times. It begins as a memoir and is based around the Allied bombings of Dresden in World War II. The author Kurt Vonnegut is a minor character in the story as the narrator and is quite funny. Both Billy Pilgrim and Kurt Vonnegut are portrayed as prisoners of war in Germany.

The book has an unusual narrative style which is quite nonlinear in time since the protagonist Billy Pilgrim is "unstuck in time" i.e. he experiences different periods of his life in seemingly random order and he has no idea which part of his life he will visit next. As a result of this queer condition, Billy experiences his own death several times and he switches back and forth between prisoner camp in Germany and his life as an affluent optometrist in Ilium, NY, and sometimes his stay on the planet Tralfamadore. One of the important events in Billy's life is when he gets abduced by aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. The Tralfamadorians teach Billy about the concept of time as the fourth dimension, fate, and death's lack of discrimination. To the Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, everything always exists and has always existed. Everyone is alive and has always been alive. They see time as we might see the Rocky Mountains, stretching endlessly on both ends. So if all events are predecided, then "what about free will?" asks Billy. The Tralfamadorian responds: "I've visited thirty-one inhabited planets in the universe... Only on Earth is there any talk of free will". This lends to the belief that human beings do what they do because they must.

The book opens with the narrator's account of his own relation with the Dresden bombings and his reasons for writing the book. Although there is no reason to believe that this account is also not fictional. Thus, the real story begins with chapter 2. I found this form of writing unusual (although amusing) which they say, is common to postmodern meta-fiction. Throughout the story, the author pokes fun at the concept of war, portraying the characters in sarcastically humorous light. Vonnegut says that the soldiers dying in these wars are young men barely out of high school. That is the reason he portrays these soldiers as scared young men instead of heroes of war. This is so that his book does not encourage more wars in which children would be sent to die (quite like the so called Childrens' Crusades).

All in all, a very entertaining and funny book. Quite an easy read.