In another Vonnegut novel, 'Breakfast of Champions', the protagonist Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author, writes many books about man destroying the world and the pointlessness of human existence.

He approached me after class one fall afternoon and gave me a soul shake for something I'd said about a Vonnegut novel we'd all been discussing - something about alienation, or maybe it was dehumanization.

In Slaughterhouse-Five (as in the two other Vonnegut novels in which he appears) Kilgore Trout plays a small but important role.

The track on the AA side was called "Salo" after a character in another Vonnegut novel.

Trout, a largely unknown pulp science fiction writer who has appeared in several other Vonnegut novels, looks like a crazy old man but is in fact relatively sane.

The scene could be the prop for a running joke in a Vonnegut novel - the one in which the fate of civilization rests in the hands of a bored switchboard operator.

Fictional novelist Kilgore Trout, often an important character in other Vonnegut novels, in Slaughterhouse-Five is a social commentator and a friend to Billy Pilgrim.

Douglas showed me the first version of his first chapter, and I read it, and it was a Vonnegut novel.

And like "Slaughterhouse-Five," in 1972, and a number of other Vonnegut novels, "Mother Night" was adapted for film, in 1996, starring Nick Nolte.