Vonnegut shares with us that he can't write about the horror of Dresden. "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre," but he feels that he has to say something. The book shows the author's struggle to find a way to write about what he saw so that it neither makes it seem good or bad. We keep this in the back of our minds as we read about Billy Pilgrim's life.

The author is a character in the narrative. He is Kurt Vonnegut, the former POW, and he speaks of the many times he has tried and failed to write this book. It is Kurt Vonnegut, too, who says the first, "So it goes" after relating that the mother of his taxi driver during his visit to Dresden in 1967 was incinerated in the Dresden attack. "So it goes" is repeated after every death. It becomes a slogan. ralfamadorian philosophy (something you will find out about later). But because the phrase is first uttered by Vonnegut, writing as Vonnegut, each "So it goes" seems to come directly from the author.

Chapter One also hints that time will be an important thing to

How are we to understand Billy's time travel? Should we believe it? Is this science fiction? Or a true story? Should we trust his sensible daughter, who thinks that her father is losing his marbles? After all, Billy first comes unstuck at a moment when he is ready to die. He is exhausted, clueless, and lost behind enemy lines. He has no idea what is happening or what has happened. People keep shooting at him, pushing him around. Under these conditions his understanding of time is permanently altered and his mind becomes (temporally) unhinged.

In Einstein's physics,an object is described by four coordinates: the three spatial and one time. If you want to say where something is, you have to also say when it is. The same is true if you want to say what something is. Things change over time. To really describe an object, you would have to describe it at every moment. The kinds of descriptions we give are just snapshots that describe an object as it looks at only one point in time. An object is actually all of the snapshots through the object's history and its future.

Human dignity in a life marked by death and mass murder is important to Slaughterhouse Five. In the first stages of his war experience, Billy Pilgrim is a man without dignity.

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1854
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)