Slaughterhouse-Five
Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and sometimes zoo occupant on a far-off planet,
lives one moment of his life, then he’s thrown back to another, then forward again, and
so on amidst the sadness of what men do to each other in this deterministic and
fatalistic universe.
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I
knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew
really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.
And so on.