Slaughterhouse No. 5

Author's Name: Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut witnessed what happened in Dresden. He was being held in a slaughterhouse with other Allied soldiers who had been captured during the fighting by the Germans.
Vonnegut survived the Holocaust for the logical reason that the slaughterhouse in which he was held was built underground.
In order to embody the horrors that resulted from the bombing of Dresden with firebombs, Vonnegut wrote a novel in which his genius was revealed on both the technical and intellectual levels, in order to bestow on the Dresden disaster unusual dimensions that make it an incident that transcends its historical reality and is beyond it.
The writer's confused reality and the difficulty of shaping it led him to reject the conventions of the traditional novel and adopt the mythical fantasy as the most appropriate medium for embodying his horrific experience.
The novel is considered one of the most widely read and popular novels in the post-World War II period. Its popularity is attributed to its strong reliance on the stock of science fiction novels. The invented myth that breathes life into the text of the novel is the myth of space travel.
Because the parts of the novel that are full of science fiction satisfy the reader’s need to fly with science fiction, the parts related to World War II leave an indelible impression in his conscience as a result of the horrors of war and the atrocities that accompanied it.