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

The fact that we are locked into our fate: Billy's death is determined years before it happens when Roland Weary meets Paul Lazzaro. Though Billy is starved, sick, and half-dead, we know that he will not die in the boxcar, the prison camp, or even in the city of Dresden; where nearly everyone else is killed. He will in fact die because one pathetic, and friendless human being, Paul Lazzaro, who feels like avenging the death of another pathetic, and friendless human being, Roland Weary.

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.

The Tralfamadorian novel discussed at the beginning of the chapter is a model for Slaughterhouse Five. A Tralfamadorian novel contains brief messages that describe events, scenes, and situations. The only thing the same about the messages is that the author has carefully chosen them so that, when seen simultaneously, they form an image of life. There is no linear narrative, no beginning, middle, climax, or end, no suspense, no moral, no reason.

The book ends in Dresden. This is the place where Billy and Vonnegut keep returning. The story ends describing springtime green: green shoots and new leaves and birds, but there is also a green wagon shaped like a coffin. Spring shows life, but the coffin does not go away.

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.

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)