This first chapter, a preface, is insistent on the fact that the book is based on real events. Vonnegut, like our narrator, is a veteran of World War II, a former prisoner of war, and a witness to a great massacre, and that fact lends a certain authority to what follows. Vonnegut shares with us his enduring inability to render in writing the horror of Dresden. There is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre, yet he feels the need to say something. The book unabashedly charts the author's struggle to find a way to write about what he saw in a way that neither belittles nor glorifies it. This struggle we keep in the back of our minds as we proceed to read of Billy Pilgrim's