Slaughterhouse Five Dresden"In Slaughterhouse Five, -- Or the Children's Crusade, Vonnegut offers 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 in the Battle of the Bulge and quartered in a Dresden slaughterhouse where he and other prisoners are employed in the production of a vitamin supplement for pregnant women during the Allied bombing of 13 February 1945 by air, i prisoners take refuge in an underground meat warehouse. When they emerge, the city has been razed to the ground and they are forced to extract corpses from the rubble firestorm in which 135,000 German civilians died, more than the number killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together Robert Scholes summarizes the theme of Slaughterhouse Five in the New York Times Book Review, writing: "Be kind." Don't hurt. Death will come for all of us anyway, and it is better to be Lot's wife looking back with salty eyes than the Deity who destroyed those cities of the plain to save them.' The reviewer concludes that "Slaughterhouse Five is a standout success". It's a book we need to read and reread.' "The popularity of Slaughterhouse Five is due, in part, to its timeliness; it deals with many issues that were vital in the late 1960s: war, ecology, overpopulation, and consumerism. Klinkowitz, writing in Literary Subversions. New American Fiction and the Practice of Criticism, sees the broader reasons for the book's success: 'Kurt Vonnegut's fiction of the 1960s is the popular artefact that may be the fairest example of American cultural change suited to the exploitative tastes of the most powerful publishers, fiction Vonnegut limped along for years on the genuinely democratic basis of family magazines and the circulation of pulp paperbacks. Then, in the late 1960s, as the culture as a whole exploded, Vonnegut was able to write and publish a novel, Slaughterhouse Five , which so perfectly captured the transformative mood of America that its story and structure became successful metaphors for the new age" "Writing in Critique, Wayne D. McGinnis comments that in Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut "avoids frame his story." in linear narration, choosing a circular structure.