5/3/15 Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughter House Five Was Good?

    I just finished reading another book, this one by Kurt Vonnegut.  It was suggested to me by Boy, and he even had a copy of Slaughter House Five in his room.  It is roughly 220 pages so I was able to read it in a week's time, here and there (meaning on the crapper). 
    Vonnegut has a strange way of writing, like he's getting into a swimming pool a little at a time.  It sounds very much like a 1st person story for the first 20 pages, then suddenly in Chapter 2, about page 23, he introduces Bill Pilgrim, who the story more or less follows up until the last five pages when Vonnegut again turns the story back to his perspective.
    In the first chapter he seems to be stammering, I almost put the book down, best I saw was a limerick:

There was a young man from Stamboul,

Who soliloquized thus to his tool:

"You took all my wealth

And you ruined my health,

And now you won't pee, you old fool."

Bill Pilgrim, though, is an interesting fellow.  He either can transport through time, has been studied by aliens (Tralfomadorians, to be precise), survived World War II as a prisoner of war, and managed to grow old and wealthy.  The story kinda flows like Pulp Fiction where the action jumps time and places very easily and routinely.  He is on a train headed to an internment camp one minute, then he flashes 20 years in the future and he is on an alien ship communicating with aliens and their ability to see a fourth dimension.  The aliens convince Bill that people don't die, time does not exist for them.  Any moment in time is always there and they can go up and down a person's timeline just by choosing where they want to see.  It is a war book which Vonnegut feels he has to write but his friend's wife has a problem with war stories being glorified.  This is part of the reason Vonnegut chooses Bill Pilgrim to talk about as there is nothing heroic about him, other than he survives being a prisoner of war and being in Dresden as Dresden is bombed by the Americans.  Even as a prisoner of war, other americans see him as someone who should die and not survive, but through luck and circumstance he unlike many other more deserving and heroic people make it through an uncomfortable time in his life.  The story ends just as Vonnegut promises  his friends wife, with a bird chirping "poo-tee-weet!"