Kurt Vonnegut · 1969 · survival
Kurt Vonnegut's anti-war novel, in which Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time and lives his life out of order. This route follows the one thread that runs straight - his war: captured as a young soldier in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge, carried by boxcar across Germany to a prison camp, and sent on to Dresden, where he survives the firebombing of the city in the cellar of a slaughterhouse. So it goes.
- 1Ilium
Billy Pilgrim's home town, where he is a barber's son and later a prosperous optometrist with a wife and a swimming pool - and the ordinary life the rest of the novel keeps interrupting without warning.
- 2The Ardennes
Sent to Luxembourg in 1944 as a chaplain's assistant with no helmet and no weapon, he is lost behind German lines within days of arriving - and it is here, wandering with Roland Weary, that he first comes unstuck in time.
- 3The prison camp
Boxcars east to a camp of British officers who have been winning at war for years on Red Cross parcels, and put on a performance of Cinderella - the only comfortable passage in the book, and it lasts one night.
- 4Dresden
Billeted in a working slaughterhouse, Schlachthof-funf, in a city with no war industry and no defences - and on the night of 13 February 1945 the prisoners are two floors underground in a meat locker when it happens.
- 5Tralfamadore
Billy says he was taken by aliens and kept in a zoo under a dome with a film star, and taught that all moments exist at once and nobody is ever really dead - which is either what happened or what Dresden did to him.
- 6Vermont
A chartered plane to an optometrists' convention flies into a mountain, and Billy is one of two survivors with a head injury - and it is only after this that he starts writing letters about the Tralfamadorians.
- 7Ilium
Back home with his daughter managing him, telling anyone who will listen about the planet and the moment of his own death, which he claims to have seen already - and so it goes, a hundred and six times over.