Slaughterhouse Five Dresden"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut delivers a comprehensive treatise on the bombing of Dresden during World War II. The main character , Billy Pilgrim, is a very young infantry scout* who is captured during the Battle of the Bulge and confined in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women during the firebombings of February 13, 1945 by the Allies, the prisoners took refuge in an underground meat shed. When they emerged, the city had been razed and they were forced to dig corpses in the rubble. Billy Pilgrim's story is the story of Kurt Vonnegut who was captured and survived a firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians perished, more than the number killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined. Robert Scholes summed up the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review when he wrote, “Be kind.” Do no harm. Either way, death is coming for us all, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back with salty eyes than the Godhead who destroyed those cities of the plain to save them. The reviewer concludes that “Slaughterhouse Five is an extraordinary success. It is a book that we must read and reread. "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many vital issues of the late sixties: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions. New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees greater reasons for the book's success: "Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artifact that is perhaps the most accurate example of American cultural change." to the exploitative tastes of big-power publishers, Vonnegut's fiction progressed for years on the truly democratic basis of the circulation of family magazines and paperbacks. Then, in the late 1960s, as culture in its. together exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five, that captured America's transformative mood so perfectly that its story and structure became bestselling metaphors for the new era. “In Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut “avoids framing his story.” in linear narration, choose a circular structure.