A prisoner of war shelters in an underground meat locker beneath Dresden while Allied bombers turn one of Europe's most beautiful cities into a furnace. Kurt Vonnegut's 1969 novel is the book he spent twenty years trying to write about that night, and its solution was to shatter chronology: Billy Pilgrim comes unstuck in time, drifting between the war, his bland postwar life as an optometrist, and an alien zoo on Tralfamadore. The fragmentation is not a trick but a trauma response rendered as narrative form. Vonnegut's prose is simple, funny, and quietly devastating, the refrain "so it goes" following every death like a shrug that conceals a scream. The novel insists there is no making sense of massacre, only the obligation to witness.