Slaughterhouse-five, or, The children's crusade a duty-dance with death
Record details
- ISBN: 0795302622 (electronic bk. : Adobe Reader)
- ISBN: 9780795302626 (electronic bk. : Adobe Reader)
- ISBN: 0795302665 (electronic bk. : Mobipocket Reader)
- ISBN: 9780795302664 (electronic bk. : Mobipocket Reader)
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Physical Description:
electronic
electronic resource
remote - Publisher: New York : RosettaBooks, 2002.
Content descriptions
General Note: | Title from eBook information screen. |
System Details Note: | Requires OverDrive Media Console Requires Adobe Reader 6.0 (file size: 875 KB) or Mobipocket Reader (file size: 273 KB). |
Search for related items by subject
Subject: | World War, 1939-1945 -- Fiction |
Genre: | EBOOK. Historical fiction. Science fiction. War stories. Electronic books. |
Electronic resources
- Baker & Taylor
An accessible paperback edition of a popular classic is a satirical social analysis that follows the haphazard life experiences of a man who is abducted by aliens and rendered a prisoner of war during the 1945 bombing of Dresden. Reissue. - Rosetta Books
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 âunstuck in timeâ 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 Vonnegutâs 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 âunstuckâ nature of Pilgrimâs experience may constitute an early novelistic use of what we now call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder; then again, Pilgrimâs aliens may be as ârealâ as Dresden is real to him. Struggling to find some purpose, order or meaning to his existence and humanityâs, Pilgrim meets the beauteous and mysterious Montana Wildhack (certainly the authorâs 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-Fivewas hugely successful, brought Vonnegut an enormous audience, was a finalist for the National Book Award and a bestseller and 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.