The concept behind Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" is striking and ingenious: a bizarre, haunting antiwar story that skillfully avoids describing the war itself.

      Vonnegut's novel revolves around the experiences of Billy Pilgrim, an unimpressive soldier and truly mediocre human being who becomes "unstuck in time" while serving during the U.S. bombing of Dresden in World War II.

      He jumps around on his own timeline, avoiding the traumatic bombing by transitioning from Dresden to less painful times throughout his life. The novel is a giant inconsistency in time, molded around a single chronological thread: the progression of the war and the bombing.

      Following Billy takes a bit of thought, but the novel is constructed so cleverly that it's worth the extra few minutes it takes to analyze Billy's latest jump. He is the only character that is really developed, a quality that lends more focus to Billy and his passive acceptance of everything and most everyone around him.

      The novel, written in Vonnegut's usual cynical and lackadaisical manner, shells out easy explanations of-- and, implicitly, warnings about-- life, war, and human nature, at times through the actions of a race of aliens, the Tralfamadorians, introduced when they abduct a disturbed Billy from his home. The aliens are privy to the happenings of the past, present, and future, a quality that parallels Billy's ability to "travel" in time, and one that introduces the bizarre notion that all of time exists at once.

       The Tralfamadorians readily provide Billy with clever, yet bleak, explanations that act as subtle mirrors of our actions as humans: when Billy wants to know how the Universe ends, he is told simply that a "Tralfamadorian test pilot presses a starter button, and the whole Universe disappears."

      It's all as simple as that in "Slaughterhouse-Five," whether it makes perfect sense or takes a stretch of the imagination to catch Vonnegut's symbolism and irony. He writes with such authority that it's hard not to accept his gutsy reasoning and his noticeable lack of emphasis on tragedy. He marks each death, accidental or intended, with the axiom "So it goes"; rather than belittling death's significance, this saying (used over 100 times) highlights the inevitability of death

      Vonnegut masters the art of expressing the absurd, ironic, and inevitable in "Slaughterhouse-Five," an incredibly written novel that just never gets old.