书名：Slaughterhouse-Five第五号屠宰场

难度：Lexile蓝思阅读指数850L
作者：Kurt Vonnegut库尔特·冯内古特
出版社名称：Dell Publishing Company
出版时间：1991
语种：英文
ISBN：9780440180296
商品尺寸：10.4 x 1.5 x 17.4 cm
包装：简装
页数：224
Slaughterhouse-Five《第五号屠宰场》是美国作家库尔特·冯内古特创作的长篇小说。该小说以二战为背景，描述一名凡人，在晚上，做了一个内容十分复杂多变的恶梦，梦中历了集中营与未来星球世界的生活，在过去和未来之间，他想到了很多的问题，并在过去和未来的世界里去找寻答案。《第五号屠宰场》跨越时空的界限，将战争的真实与科幻的奇异交织起来，在新奇的视野中揭露真实，成为20世纪美国重要的小说之一。

《第五号屠宰场》，揭示了当人面对荒诞的死亡，人要成为“死亡”的主人这一深刻主题。“死亡”在《第五号屠宰场》中，由一种被动的悲观等待变成了一种主动的生存美学。把“死亡”看作是重塑和再生的必经之路。
由该作品改编的同名电影《第五屠宰场》，于1972年在美国上映。

Review
“Poignant and hilarious, threaded with compassion and, behind everything, the cataract of a thundering moral statement.”  — The Boston Globe

“Very tough and very funny... sad and delightful... very Vonnegut.”  — The New York Times

“Splendid art... a funny book at which you are not permitted to laugh, a sad book without tears.”  — Life
主人公毕利，在第二次世界大战中，他随部队到达欧洲，参加了保吉战役，结果被德军俘虏，随后到德国德累斯顿的一个地下屠宰场做苦工。德累斯顿是一座历史悠久的美丽古城，没有任何军事目标。然而就是这样一座城市，1945年却遭到英美联军的联合轰炸，被一夜间夷为平地。毕利被关在地下冷藏室而幸免于难，然而这段经历却给他造成无法愈合的精神创伤。 

毕利由于战争精神深受刺激，心理受创伤之后经常出现幻想：他遭遇飞碟绑架，被送到特拉法玛多星球，在星球动物园中像动物般被展出和观看。
毕利挣脱了时间的羁绊，他就寝的时候，是个衰老的鳏夫，醒来时却在举行婚礼。他从1955年的门进去，却从另一个门1941年出来了。
Billy Pilgrim is the son of an American barber. He serves as a chaplain's assistant in World War II, is captured by the Germans, and he survives the largest massacre in European history the fire bombing of Dresden. After the war Billy makes a great deal of money as an optometrist, and on his wedding night he is kidnapped by a flying saucer from the planet Tralfamadore. So begins a modern classic by a master storyteller.

Kurt Vonnegutwas a master of contemporary American literature. His 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” with Cat's Cradle in 1963. He was, as Graham Greene declared, “one of the best living American writers.” Mr. Vonnegut passed away in April 2007.
All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn't his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war. And so on. I've changed all the names. 

I really did go back to Dresden with Guggenheim money (God love it) in 1967. It looked a lot like Dayton, Ohio, more open spaces than Dayton has. There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground.
I went back there with an old war buddy, Bernard V. O'Hare, and we made friends with a cab driver, who took us to the slaughterhouse where we had been locked up at night as prisoners of war. His name was Gerhard Müller. He told us that he was a prisoner of the Americans for a while. We asked him how it was to live under Communism, and he said that it was terrible at first, because everybody had to work so hard, and because there wasn't much shelter or food or clothing. But things were much better now. He had a pleasant little apartment, and his daughter was getting an excellent education. His mother was incinerated in the Dresden fire-storm. So it goes.
He sent O'Hare a postcard at Christmastime, and here is what it said:
“I wish you and your family also as to your friend Merry Christmas and a happy New Year and I hope that we'll meet again in a world of peace and freedom in the taxi cab if the accident will.”
I like that very much: “If the accident will.”
I would hate to tell you what this lousy little book cost me in money and anxiety and time. When I got home from the Second World War twenty-three years ago, I thought it would be easy for me to write about the destruction of Dresden, since all I would have to do would be to report what I had seen. And I thought, too, that it would be a masterpiece or at least make me a lot of money, since the subject was so big.
But not many words about Dresden came from my mind then — not enough of them to make a book, anyway. And not many words come now, either, when I have become an old fart with his memories and his Pall Malls, with his sons full grown.
I think of how useless the Dresden part of my memory has been, and yet how tempting Dresden has been to write about, and I am reminded of the famous limerick:
There was a young man from Stamboul, Who soliloquized thus to his tool: “You took all my wealth And you ruined my health, And now you won't pee, you old fool.”
And I'm reminded, too, of the song that goes:
My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin, I work in a lumbermill there. The people I meet when I walk down the street, They say, “What's your name?” And I say, “My name is Yon Yonson, I work in Wisconsin...”
And so on to infinity.