Slaughter-House Five

Adapted for a magnificent George Roy Hill film three years later (perhaps the only film adaptation of a masterpiece which exceeds its source), SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE (1969) is the now famous parable of Billy Pilgrim, a World War II veteran and POW who has in the later stage of his life become "unstuck in time" and who experiences at will (or unwillingly) all known events of his chronology out of order and sometimes simultaneously. Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralmafadorians who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence). The "unstuck" nature of Pilgrim's experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; then again Pilgrim's aliens may be as "real" as Dresden is real to him. Struggling to find some purpose, order or meaning to his existence and humanity's, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the author's best character name), has a child with her and drifts on some supernal plane, finally, in which Kilgore Trout, the Tralmafadorians, Montana Wildhack and the ruins of Dresden do not merge but rather disperse through all planes of existence. SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE was hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a bestseller. It remains four decades later as timeless and shattering a war fiction as CATCH-22 with which it stands as the two signal novels of their riotous and furious decade. |||This book is sold in the US by Sony Electronics Inc. |||This book is sold in Canada by Sony Electronics Inc.

• Published by

  RosettaBooks

• Publish Date

  August 31, 2010 

• eBook ISBN

  9780795311987

• Imprint

  RosettaBooks

• Filesize

  1.79 MB

• Number of Print Pages*

  N/A

* Number of eBook pages may differ. Click here for more information.