Both sorrowful and funny, Slaughterhouse-Five is the book that pushed Vonnegut to national prominence after years of middling success as a sort-of-sci-fi-sort-of-political-sort-of-philosophically-humorous writer. It's remains pretty incredible it happened because it's not as though Slaughterhouse abandoned Vonnegut's genre-defying style. The novel is about the lifelong impact WWII had on the young men—read: teenagers; read: children—sent to fight in it. Told through flashbacks our cowardly protagonist, Billy Pilgrim, is having as he becomes unstuck in time (a side-effect, you see, from his time being abducted by aliens from Tralfamador and put in an alien zoo where he was paired with a famous Hollywood actress as a mate) and travels back and forth through the events of his life. You know, a classic WWII novel format. Billy relives his capture by the Germans and his time as a POW during the bombing of Dresden. Oh, Vonnegut himself is also in the novel, both as its narrator and author and as one of Billy's fellow POWs with a sever case of the runs.