The format of the book is difficult to describe. If you've ever read "The Sound and the Fury," you'll find that it's kinda like that, but a LOT easier to follow. The author's a character in the novel, which doesn't happen to often, I find, and he's telling the story of Pilgrim.
He does it in a way where there really is no Beginning or End, it's all just Billy's story, and becuase there are multiple time skips, it has to be done that way. You'll find that Billy travels through time whenever he goes to sleep, when he takes a piss, haha, when he's getting yelled... pretty much whenever. There's a part in the story when Billy asks one of the Tralfamadorians for something to read, and, aside from some shitty earth book, all they have are Tralfamadorian books. Slaughterhouse-Five is set up like a Tralfamadorian book, as it's divided into many sections (you'll find lots of breaks in the book), and that it's meant to be looked at as a whole, not from beginning to end. Because they're concept of time is that everything's already "there," if you will, it's already happened that way, it's going to happen that way again, andit'll happen that way every time (if that makes any sense right now), they can see the book in its entirety.
So, yeah... What I mean by that is that Billy's in no one particular place in time. Well, actually, that's a lie. The author jumps to present tense once or twice, and Billy's alive during this time (the author doesn't claim to have the ability to time-travel). Still, the audience follows him where ever (actually whenever) the fuck he goes.
