In the first chapter of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, one character tells the narrator that when he hears someone is writing an anti-war...

Slaughterhouse-Five is an anti-war novel. Vonnegut's protagonist suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder. Billy Pilgrim's psyche has become so fractured that he "has become unstuck in time." Due to the trauma he has suffered in the war, Billy is unable to live in the present.

Even before he begins to suffer from PTSD, Vonnegut is careful to portray Billy Pilgrim and all of the other soldiers in non-heroic terms. Billy looks more like a "filthy flamingo" than a soldier, and the men who capture Billy are "droolers as toothless as carp."

At one point, Billy, while watching a World War II documentary, imagines that he is seeing the film backward. Rather than dropping bombs, the bombers "flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers , and lifted the containers into the bellies of the planes." The bombs are then dismantled and buried "so they would never hurt anybody ever again."

Vonnegut ends his novel with the word "Poo-tee-weet?" because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." In effect, Vonnegut is saying that war makes no sense, and there is nothing intelligent to be said about it.