Slaughterhouse-five: A Duty Dance With Death

　　《第五號屠宰場》被譽為全世界最偉大的反戰書之一，故事主要圍繞在二次大戰時德國德勒斯登一場因空襲而起的大火，劫後餘生的主角畢勒在其間展開一場自由穿梭時空的冒險之旅。

　　在馮內果的小說中，畢勒的戰場沒有方向、沒有敵我、沒有意義，只有死活﹔這對一條高舉國家民族大旗的戰爭而言，自然是一個很激烈的神話瓦突。這樣的反戰觀念，在我們今日的「後越戰時代」裡，已經不算新鮮，但我們不要忘了，這個新世代的戰爭觀點正是這本小說推波助瀾帶來。

本書中譯本由麥田出版。

Kurt Vonnegut’s masterpiece, Slaughterhouse-Five is ＂a desperate, painfully honest attempt to confront the monstrous crimes of the twentieth century＂ (Time).

Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best novels of all time - One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years

Slaughterhouse-Five, an American classic, is one of the world’s great antiwar books. Centering on the infamous World War II firebombing of Dresden, the novel is the result of what Kurt Vonnegut described as a twenty-three-year struggle to write a book about what he had witnessed as an American prisoner of war. It combines historical fiction, science fiction, autobiography, and satire in an account of the life of Billy Pilgrim, a barber’s son turned draftee turned optometrist turned alien abductee. As Vonnegut had, Billy experiences the destruction of Dresden as a POW. Unlike Vonnegut, he experiences time travel, or coming ＂unstuck in time.＂

An instant bestseller, Slaughterhouse-Five made Kurt Vonnegut a cult hero in American literature, a reputation that only strengthened over time, despite his being banned and censored by some libraries and schools for content and language. But it was precisely those elements of Vonnegut’s writing--the political edginess, the genre-bending inventiveness, the frank violence, the transgressive wit--that have inspired generations of readers not just to look differently at the world around them but to find the confidence to say something about it. Authors as wide-ranging as Norman Mailer, John Irving, Michael Crichton, Tim O’Brien, Margaret Atwood, Elizabeth Strout, David Sedaris, Jennifer Egan, and J. K. Rowling have all found inspiration in Vonnegut’s words. Jonathan Safran Foer has described Vonnegut as ＂the kind of writer who made people--young people especially--want to write.＂ George Saunders has declared Vonnegut to be ＂the great, urgent, passionate American writer of our century, who offers us . . . a model of the kind of compassionate thinking that might yet save us from ourselves.＂

More than fifty years after its initial publication at the height of the Vietnam War, Vonnegut’s portrayal of political disillusionment, PTSD, and postwar anxiety feels as relevant, darkly humorous, and profoundly affecting as ever, an enduring beacon through our own era’s uncertainties.

Kurt Vonnegut’s black humor, satiric voice, and incomparable imagination first captured America’s attention in The Sirens of Titan in 1959, and established him as ＂a true artist＂ (The New York Times) with Cat’s Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, ＂one of the best living American writers.＂ Kurt Vonnegut died in April 2007.