Slaughterhouse-Five

The other defining anti-war satire — Heller uses manic acceleration where Vonnegut uses deadpan stillness, but both argue that war is run by and for the insane

Another war memoir-novel that blurs author and character, and asks what obligation a writer has to the truth of what he survived

The other great anti-war novel — Remarque from the German side, both books making the soldier's experience utterly unlike the propaganda

Vonnegut's earlier novel using invented religion (Bokononism) as a coping mechanism — the same formal move as Tralfamadorianism, applied to nuclear apocalypse

Another novel in which trauma makes time non-linear — Morrison uses ghost as metaphor where Vonnegut uses aliens, but both are about the past that cannot be left in the past

The conventional WWII novel Vonnegut is arguing against — heroic, realist, chronological, everything Slaughterhouse-Five refuses to be