Kurt Vonneguts Slaughter House

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ring from an elevator shaft.
Billy Pilgrim's life is structured in such a way where he floats from experience to experience (in no chronological order). He has the ability to become "unstuck in time", which means that he can uncontrollably drift from one part of his life to another. Ironically, Slaughterhouse- Five is structurally organized in the same way Billy moves in time. It consists of sections and paragraphs strung together in no particular order. The entire story is not only written in the past tense, so the reader cannot identify where the author's starting point is, but it is also written in a circular way- with every experience leading back to another. The entire novel is composed of Vonnegut's usage of irony to combat irony.
The most often expressed ironical theme of the book, in my opinion, is that we, people, are "bugs in amber." The phrase first appears when Billy is kidnapped by the Tralfamadorian flying saucer:
" Welcome aboard, Mr. Pilgrim," said the ...

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