Slaugherhouse Five is a novel that was written by Kurt Vonnegut. It was published in 1969 and remains one of the Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpieces. This book was based on Kurt’s experiences in Dresden,Germany where he was being kept as a prisoner of war during the destruction of the town in 1945. The novel starts with the narrator which is Kurt Vonnegut himself. Vonnegut stars the novel by talking about the difficulties that he has faced to find ways to write about his experiences in Dresden and then he introduces us to the pathetic young man named Billy Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim is a wartime chaplain and a prisoner of war who has become “unstuck in time” and travels between different parts of his life. It is an anti-war novel that was written in the third person from Vonnegut’s own point of view. Several times the author stops and let’s us know that the character he has just described, or quoted is, in fact is, himself. Vonnegut wants to say to the audience that war is evil and the first casualty of war is the human dignity. There are no heroes to be found in the novel, and as Vonnegut says in the introduction, “There are almost no characters in this story, and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick, and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces. One of the main effects of war, after all, is that people are discouraged from being characters..." The novel gives us a moving portrait of a soldier fighting a war he doesn’t understand but he is forced to live with it. Yet somehow he is supposed to continue his living by experiencing the dreadful wartime. 

I dream of giving birth to a child who will ask, "Mother, what was war?"  ~Eve Merriam