Sound Off in the Forum   Bookmark and Share  One of the most
popular American novels of the twentieth century, Kurt
Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five has found itself in the odd
position of having been trivialized by the very labels people
have attached to it in order to catalog its greatness. Inspired
by Kurt Vonnegut's personal WWII experiences during the
firebombing of Dresden in early 1945, the book was released
during the peak of the Vietnam War and its counterculture
protests. Thus it has always been labeled an anti-war novel due
to both its subject matter and its vintage. It is anti-war, but
that's not all it is. The category is too simplistic, like
calling Les Misérables a crime story. Slaughterhouse-Five is
actually a treatise on death — both a pragmatic acceptance of
its inevitability, as summed up by the repeated, fatalistic
signature phrase "So it goes," and a bold defiance of its power
over us.  To the latter end, Vonnegut offers the quintessential
everyman, Billy Pilgrim, whose very name evokes the