Slaughterhouse-Five, an anti-war science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut dealing with the World War II experiences and journeys through time of a soldier called Billy Pilgrim.
Chaplain’s Assistant Billy Pilgrim, a disoriented, fatalistic, ill-trained American soldier, is captured by the Germans during the Battle of the Bulge and taken to a prison in Dresden. The Germans put Billy and his fellow prisoners in a disused slaughterhouse, known as «Slaughterhouse number 5». The PoWs and German guards alike hide in a deep cellar; because of their safe hiding place, they are some of the few survivors of the city-destroying firestorm during the Bombing of Dresden in World War II.
Billy has come «unstuck in time» and experiences past and future events out of sequence and repetitively. He is kidnapped by extraterrestrial aliens from the planet Tralfamadore. They exhibit him in a zoo with B-movie starlet Montana Wildhack as his mate. The Tralfamadorians, who can see in four dimensions, have already seen every instant of their lives. They believe in predestination. They say they cannot choose to change anything about their fates, but can choose to concentrate upon any moment in their lives, and Billy becomes convinced of the correctness of their theories.
As Billy travels — or believes he travels — forward and backward in time, he relives occasions of his life, real and fantastic. He spends time on Tralfamadore, in Dresden, in the War, walking in deep snow before his German capture, in his mundane post-war married life in the U.S.A. of the 1950s, and in the moment of his murder by Lazzaro.
Billy’s death is the consequence of a string of events. Before the Germans capture Billy, he meets Roland Weary, a jingoist character who constantly chastises him for his lack of enthusiasm toward war. At their capture, the Germans confiscate everything Weary has, including his boots, giving him clogs to wear; Weary eventually dies of gangrene caused by the clogs. On his deathbed, Weary managed to convince Paul Lazzaro that Billy is to blame; Paul vows to avenge Weary’s death by killing Billy, because revenge is «the sweetest thing in life». Time-traveler Billy already knows where, when, and how he will be killed: he is shot with a laser gun after his speech on flying saucers and the true nature of time before a large audience in Chicago, in balkanized United States on February 13, 1976 (in future to the date of writing).
Νότια του Βασιλείου της Δανιμαρκίας 