In this first chapter, we see that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like the narrator, is a veteran of World War II, an earlier prisoner of war, and a witness to a great massacre.
             Vonnegut shares with us that he can't write about the horror of Dresden. "There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre," but he feels that he has to say something. The book shows the author's struggle to find a way to write about what he saw so that it neither makes it seem good or bad. We keep this in the back of our minds as we read about Billy Pilgrim's life.
             The author is a character in the narrative. He is Kurt Vonnegut, the former POW, and he speaks of the many times he has tried and failed to write this book. It is Kurt Vonnegut, too, who says the first, "So it goes" after relating that the mother of his taxi driver during his visit to Dresden in 1967 was incinerated in the Dresden attack. "So it goes" is repeated after every death. It becomes a slogan. ralfamadorian philosophy (something you will find out about later). But because the phrase is first uttered by Vonnegut, writing as Vonnegut, each "So it goes" seems to come directly from the author.
             Chapter One also hints that time will be an important thing to follow. The author was going around and around in circles trying to create a timeline. He felt like he was stuck inside a children's song that repeats itself again, and again, and again...The children's song's last line is also the first. Only when the author begins to think about time, about returning over and over to the events of someone's life, about "moments existing for eternity in no particular order", is he able to break through twenty years of writer's block, and write Slaughterhouse Five.
             The constant skipping around in time can be confusing to the reader because we are used to linear narrative. The way you feel reading the narrative is like to the way Billy ...