Wisdom to Tell: Why ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ Still Matters

Reviewing Kurt Vonnegut’s Classic Anti-War Novel

When Billy Pilgrim is a boy, his father chucks him in the pool to teach him how to swim. As a young chaplain’s assistant in World War Two he’s captured by German soldiers and pressed into grueling conditions aboard a prison train before surviving the firebombing of Dresden, Germany.

After the war, he becomes an optometrist, enters a mental hospital, marr…