Free Will and War in Slaughterhouse Five Slaughterhouse Five is a strangely fascinating anti-war book with quite a relevant historical background, written by Kurt Vonnegut, who experienced firsthand the events in Dresden during World War II. Vonnegut was a prisoner in Dresden, Germany, and at the time Dresden was a relatively defenseless and militarily squalid city. “The city was bombed so successfully (and senselessly) that 135,000 civilians were killed in the violent firestorm” (McKean). The suffering in Dresden was so horrific that writers, artists, and historians have had difficulty conveying how horrific it actually was. Vonnegut wrote about his experiences creating the story by throwing out several drafts, and in the few two hundred for example, his narrator is in Dresden during the bombing and firestorm, he learns what happened by eavesdropping on the guards whispering, a way to lessen the violence Vonnegut witnessed. It is worth mentioning that Vonnegut often describes himself as speechless when thinking about the bombing of Dresden. For example, in the first chapter of Slaughterhouse Five "I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden since all I would have to do was report what I had seen. And I also thought it would be a masterpiece, or at least earn a lot of money since the topic was so big then. Not many words came to mind about Dresden... And not many words come to mind now either." (Vonnegut 2). It's clear that the author has a complicated relationship with words that ultimately come as his famous opening line "All of this happened, more or less. The war parts, however, are pretty much true" (Vonnegut 1). The phrase “pretty much true” is designed to make readers uncomfortable. Returning to the previous quote, in his last book "Palm Sunday" Vonnegut expresses guilt for having benefited from his success. "The Dresden atrocity, tremendously expensive and meticulously planned, was ultimately so meaningless that only in the first place were his experiences during the war downright traumatic; he gets lost behind enemy lines during the Battle of the Bulge, is taken prisoner by Germans, sees a fellow soldier die of gangrene on his way out of a POW camp, so he goes, is crammed into a train for days with other POWs, survives the bombing of Dresden then sees the aftermath of the firestorm, including many burned bodies and charred, and then witnesses the execution of another prisoner of war for stealing a teapot, so there is no doubt that Billy has experienced flashbacks of the war as if these incidents were happening in the present. It is not surprising that he suffers from this too hallucinations. But what about aliens with toilet plungers? So Billy Pilgrim has a lot of memories clogged up in his mind, right? The hallucinations of these aliens help Billy process the ugly, clogged memories of war and horror. Something similar between the Germans and the Tralfamadorian aliens is that they both made Billy undress when he arrived, the Germans refuse to answer because they beat one prisoner and not another, the Tralfamadorian aliens refuse to answer because they took Billy, the Germans confine Billy to a slaughterhouse, the Tralfamadorians confine him to a zoo. So obviously there are parallels between his past and