In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut's themes of war and time travel tell the story of World War II Dresden through the eyes of Billy Pilgrim. Vonnegut uses flashbacks and blackouts to take Billy through different eras of his life to allow him to develop a way to cope with the bombing of Dresden. Throughout Slaughterhouse-Five, protagonist Billy Pilgrim depicts World War II with a twist. War has several disadvantages such as the damage it causes on those who were involved and the negative effects on the prisoners and the negative problems the prisoners face are constantly face to face with death as if they could not not escape the horrors. Billy's first near-death experience was as follows: “In early 1968, a group of optometrists, including Billy, chartered a plane to take them from Ilium to an international convention of optometrists in Montreal. The plane crashed atop Sugarbush Mountain in Vermont. Everyone was killed except Billy. So it goes. (Vonnegut, 60 years old) This horrible experience made Billy realize that death is something that happens to everyone and that there is no escaping it. Negativity is an example in the theme of war, because before Billy learned to cope, he dwelled on death. Before you know it, Billy is confronted with war when: “American fighter planes came in under the smoke to see if anything moved. They saw Billy and the others there. The planes sprayed them with machine gun bullets, but the bullets missed their target. Then they saw other people going down to the river and they shot them. They hit some of them. So it goes. The idea was to hasten the end of the war. (Vonnegut, 378-379) There is no way to describe the tragedy. These people are... middle of paper...... to escape a place destroyed because of the war. He can't understand this world and why things like people start being killed happen, so he has to escape. The world is in a double fourth-dimensional paradox, difficult to understand and full of destruction and despair. The free will of these humans is incredibly difficult to achieve. These people have to accept the fact that they are going to die, it's in their destiny and Billy understood that he couldn't stop that from happening. The title of the book represents a safe place for Billy ironically being a slaughterhouse. A place composed of death and emptiness. The book was written in a way that Kurt Vonnegut tells his life story through a fictional character in order to remember the problems he faced. Flashbacks and blackouts help pass time and show the similarities between war and time travel..