The novel begins with the plot of the book about the bombing of Dresden. The author complains that he cannot come up with the right words for this book, which he considered his main work. To plan a future book, he met with fellow soldier Bernard O'Hare. O'Hare's wife Mary became very angry when she learned about the intention of the book about war, because in all such books like Slaughterhouse-Five there is an element of glorification of war - a cynical lie that supports new wars. 

Vonnegut's conversation with Mary is a key episode at the beginning of the novel, he explains why the book about Dresden is so strange, short, and confusing that it does not prevent it from being anti-war. It is also clear from this dialogue where the second title of the novel came from.

As a result, the novel was dedicated to Mary O'Hare and Dresden taxi driver Gerhard Müller and was written in the "telegraphic-schizophrenic style", as Vonnegut himself puts it. Realism, grotesque, fantasy, elements of madness, cruel satire and bitter irony are closely intertwined in the book.

The main character is American soldier Billy Pilgrim, a ridiculous, timid, apathetic person, whose prototype was Vonnegut's colleague Edward Crown. The book describes the adventures of the Pilgrim in the war and the bombing of Dresden, which left an indelible imprint on the mental state of the Pilgrim, which has not been very stable since childhood. Vonnegut introduced a fantastic element into the story: the events of the protagonist's life are viewed through the prism of post-traumatic stress disorder - a syndrome typical of war veterans that crippled the hero's perception of reality. As a result, the comical "story about aliens" grows into a kind of harmonious philosophical system.

Aliens from the planet Tralfamador take Billy Pilgrim to their planet and tell him that time does not actually "flow", there is no gradual random transition from one event to another - the world and time are given once and for all, everything that happened and will happen is known ... Of someone's death, the Tralfamadorians simply say, "Such is the case." One cannot say why or why something happened - that was the “structure of the moment”.

The composition of the novel is also explained in such an artistic way - it is not a story about successively replacing events, but episodes of the Pilgrim's life going without any order. He learned to travel in time from aliens, and every episode is such a journey.

Here are some of the moments that the flow of time brings Pilgrim:

1. Psychological trauma of childhood (fright at the sight of the Grand Canyon, the first bad experience of swimming).
2. A long march through the winter forest with a few other soldiers. Having fought off the detachment, they are forced to wander through unfamiliar places. Autobiographical (however, like many others in the book) moment.
3. Captivity and events in the British POW camp.
4. Work in Dresden, settlement at slaughterhouse number 5 and bombardment, which in one night wiped out the city from the face of the earth. A subtle artistic move - further events, such as a meeting with aliens, can be explained from the point of view that Billy simply went crazy - numerous nervous shocks, the largest of which is the moment of the bombardment that accumulated in the hero, eventually after many years led to a clouding of consciousness.
5. Mental hospital. After several months after the war, Billy continues to take optometry courses when he has a nervous breakdown. At the asylum, Billy met Eliot Rosewater and the books of Kilgore Trout.
6. Events after the war - a calm measured life with an ugly, but kind and sympathetic wife. 
7. Wealth, which Pilgrim did not aspire to, came to him in the field of ophthalmic medicine.
8. Meeting Aliens - Flight to Tralfamadore and exhibiting Billy Pilgrim as a zoo resident for the fun of aliens. There he was paired with former movie star Montana Wildback.
9. Plane crash and hospital. Billy was on a plane with the other optometrists to the exit when he hit a mountain. Only he and the co-pilot survive in a plane crash. Having received a head injury, he ends up in a hospital, where he is mistaken for a "vegetable" for a long time. There he meets Bertram Remford, a 70-year-old former colonel who wrote a book on the history of aviation.
10. Death by laser sniper rifle after Pilgrim's seminar, in which he spreads ideas learned from the Tralfamadorians. As a time traveler, Billy saw his own death many times and predicted it in every detail.