Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five

Slaughterhouse Five is a historical fiction written by Kurt Vonnegut detailing his experiences during World War II through a fictional character named Billy Pilgrim. The book is written in a nonlinear fashion, taking place during the bloody World War II. Throughout the book, Billy Pilgrim continuously jumps through time between 1944 and 1967. After coming home from World War II, the narrator, Vonnegut, wanted to write a book about the destruction of Dresden. Vonnegut thought it would be easy for him to write about his experience in Dresden, as all he had to do was write a short report about what he had seen. Struggling to write his book, he turned to an old war time buddy, Bernard V O’Hare, to see if he had anything to offer. They traveled

That same night, Billy claims that he was kidnapped by aliens existing in the fourth dimension, where they view everything completely differently. After spending a couple of nights on the planet of Tralfamadorian, Billy was warped back to Earth at the same time that he was kidnapped. He kept quiet about this odd incident until he got into a plane crash, where he finally confessed about his alien abduction. Most people didn’t believe him, and his daughter thought that her father had gone insane. Billy would eventually go on a radio show to tell his stories about his alien abduction and the Tralfamadorians’ concept of time. On the same day Billy went on an optometry trip, his wife Valencia was rear ended by a car on her way to the hospital. She continued to drive because her car was not badly damaged, but she no longer had mufflers. When she arrived at the hospital, she had inhaled so much carbon monoxide that she turned a sickly shade of blue. Billy later predicted that in his future he would die in 1976 by a laser gun after the United States had been split up into smaller nations and a hydrogen bomb was dropped on Chicago. What Billy experienced in World War II, could be told by countless other war

The Japanese failed to comply with unconditional surrender, leaving the United States with no choice but to drop atomic bombs on Japan. The first bomb, Little Boy, was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. With no response from the Japanese government, the United States dropped a second atomic bomb on Japan. The second bomb, Fat man, was dropped on Nagasaki on August 8, 1945. Japanese Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender on August 15, signing the papers on September