Billy Pilgrim is a mild-mannered middle-class optometrist from New York State. The sole survivor of a charter-plane crash, he begins speaking in public about the close encounter of the third kind he experienced. Abducted in a flyer saucer by laughable BEMS (bug eyed monsters), Billy claims he was exhibited naked in the equivalent of a zoo on the planet Tralfamadore, accompanied by a luscious movie starlet called Montana Wildhack. Pilgrim's psychological arrow of time has disintegrated and now resembles that of the Tralfamadorians. Instead of perceiving chronology as flowing in the direction of the thermodynamic arrow, Billy is involuntarily shuttled back and forth between different episodes in his life, most notably the period he spent as a naive young GI during the Second World War. In December 1944, when his unit is captured by the Wehrmacht, Billy is led into the ornate, fairytale city of Dresden, the most exquisite place he has ever seen. He experiences at first hand the asinine folly of war and the arbitrary nature of fate when the city is razed by the most brutal incendiary bombing in history. While the firestorm rages, Billy and his companions, good and evil, shelter in the cellars beneath the abattoir in which they are billeted. When they emerge it is to desolation that only his dialogues with the philosophically inclined Tralfamadorians will allow him to endure.

Based on his own experience of wartime Dresden, Slaughterhouse-Five was the witty, sardonic and wise book that made Vonnegut an international literary bestseller. His sophisticated, ironic style - warm, shoulder-shrugging, misanthropic yet hopeful - has long been critically admired, dextrously employing speculative ideas as plangent metaphors for the eternal absurdities of the inhuman condition. Although his early SF novels The Sirens of Titan and Cat's Cradle are his purest works, Slaughterhouse-Five reveals Vonnegut at the pinnacle of his interdisciplinary standing, encompassing the gleeful energy of genre SF and the knowing perspective of mainstream satire. His attachment to SF is embodied by Kilgore Trout, a screwball-savant sci-fi hack who often operates as Vonnegut's sagacious mouthpiece in several of his other hilarious, humanitarian novels.

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