Slaughterhouse-Five
"So it goes." Billy Pilgrim's unstuck-in-time structure is both a formal innovation and the only honest response to the firebombing of Dresden: there is no narrative that can contain mass death, so the novel does not try. Vonnegut published it in 1969. The anti-war novel that made subsequent anti-war novels possible.
Vonnegut's shrug is the whole book. 'So it goes' anesthetizes each death until none of them lands, Billy Pilgrim is a passenger in his own life by design, and Tralfamadorian fatalism comes uncomfortably close to ruling that Dresden was nobody's fault. The casualty figure Vonnegut trusted came from a historian later disgraced. Resignation dressed as wisdom; that is the charge.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
