One of Vonnegut''s major works, this is an apocalyptic tale of
the planet''s ultimate fate, featuring a cast of unlikely
heroes.
關於作者：
Kurt Vonnegut was 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.
目錄：
1 THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED
2 NICE, NICE, VERY NICE
3 FOLLY
4 A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS
5 LETTER FROM A
PRE-MED
6 BUG FIGHTS
7 THE ILLUSTRIOUS HOENIKKERS
8 NEWT''S THING WITH ZINKA
9 VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES
10 SECRET AGENT X-9
11 PROTEIN
12 END OF THE WORLD DELIGHT
13 THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE
14 WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES
15 MERRY CHRISTMAS
16 BACK TO KINDERGARTEN
17 THE GIRL POOL
18 THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH
19 NO MORE MUD
20 ICE-NINE I
21 THE MARINES MARCH ON
22 MEMBER OF THE YELLOW PRESS
23 THE LAST BATCH OF BROWNIES
……
內容試閱：
Chapter One
The Day the World Ended
Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me
John.
Jonah--John--if I had been a Sam, I would have been Jonah
still--not because I have been unlucky for others, but because
somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at
certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both
conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to
plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah
was there.
Listen:
When I was a younger man--two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago,
3,000 quarts of booze ago . . .
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a
book to be called The Day the World Ended.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done
on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima,
Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to
teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was
unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this
little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San
Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams
that do God''s Will without ever discovering what they are doing.
Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the
kan-kan, that bought me into my own particular karass was the book
I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World
Ended.
Chapter Two
Nice, Nice, Very Nice
"If you find your life tangled up with somebody else''s life for no
very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, "that person may be a member
of your karass."
At another point in The Books of Bokonon he tells us, "Man created
the checkerboard; God created the karass." By that he means that a
karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and
class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his "Fifty-third Calypso," Bokonon invites us to sing along with
him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen--
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice very nice--
So many different people
In the same device.
Chapter Three
Folly
Nowhere does Bokonon warn against a person''s trying to discover the
limits of his karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has
had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are
bound to be incomplete.
In the autobiographical section of The Books of Bokonon he writes a
parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to
understand:
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who
asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The
lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly.
She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what
had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed
to build, she said to me, "I''m sorry, but I never could read one of
those things."
"Give it to your husband or your ministers to pass on to God," I
said, "and, when God finds a minute, I''m sure he''ll explain this
doghouse of mine in a way that even you can understand."
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed that God liked
people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats.
She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she
screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees
what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
Chapter Four
A Tentative Tangling
Of Tendrils
Be that as it may, I intend in this book to include as many members
of my karass as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as
to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.
I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism.
I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The
first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:
"All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless
lies."
My Bokononist warning in this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on
lies will not understand this book either.
So be it.
. . .
About my karass, then.
It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one
of the so-called "Fathers" of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker
himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead
before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with
those of his children.
The first of his heirs to be touched by my sinookas was Newton
Hoenikker, the youngest of his three children, the younger of his
two sons. I learned from the publication of my fraternity, The
Delta Upsilon Quarterly, that Newton Hoenikker, son of the Noel
Prize physicist, Felix Hoenikker, had been pledged by my chapter,
the Cornell Chapter.
So I wrote this letter to Newt:
"Dear Mr. Hoenikker:
"Or should I say, Dear Brother Hoenikker?
"I am a Cornell DU now making my living as a free-lance writer. I
am gathering material for a book relating to the first atomic bomb.
Its contents will be limited to events that took place on August 6,
1945, the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
"Since your late father is generally recognized as having been one
of the chief creators of the bomb, I would very much appreciate any
anecdotes you might care to give me of life in your father''s house
on the day the bomb was dropped.
"I am sorry to say that I don''t know as much about your illustrious
family as I should, and so don''t know whether you have brothers and
sisters. If you do have brothers and sisters, I should like very
much to have their addresses so that I can send similar requests to
them.
"I realize that you were very young when the bomb was dropped,
which is all to the good, My book is going to emphasize the human
rather than the technical side of the bomb, so recollections of the
day through the eyes of a ''baby, if you''ll pardon the expression,
would fit in perfectly.
"You don''t have to worry about style and form. Leave all that to
me. Just give me the bare bones of your story.
"I will, of course, submit the final version to you for your
approval prior to publication.
"Fraternally yours--"
Chapter Five
Letter from
a pre med
To which Newt replied:
"I am sorry to be so long about answering your letter. That sounds
like a very interesting book you are doing. I was so young when the
bomb was dropped that I don''t think I''m going to be much help. You
should really ask my brother and sister, who are both older than I
am. My sister is Mrs. Harrison C. Conners, 4918 North Meridian
Street, Indianapolis, Indiana. That is my home address, too, now. I
think she will be glad to help you. Nobody knows where my brother
Frank is. He disappeared right after Father''s funeral two years
ago, and nobody has heard from him since. For all we know, he may
be dead now.
"I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on
Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other people have
helped me to remember.
"I remember I was playing on the living-room carpet outside my
father''s study door in Ilium, New York. The door was open, and I
could see my father. He was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. He was
smoking a cigar. He was playing with a loop of string. Father was
staying home from the laboratory in his pajamas all day that day.
He stayed home whenever he wanted to.
"Father, as you probably know, spent practically his whole
professional life working for the Research Laboratory of the
General Forge and Foundry Company in Ilium. When the Manhattan
Project came along, the bomb project, Father wouldn''t leave Ilium
to work on it. He said he wouldn''t work on it at all unless they
let him work where he wanted to work. A lot of the time that meant
at home. The only place he liked to go, outside of Ilium, was our
cottage on Cape Cod. Cape Cod was where he died. He died on a
Christmas Eve. You probably know that, too.
"Anyway, I was playing on the carpet outside his study on the day
of the bomb. My sister Angela tells me I used to play with little
toy trucks for hours, making motor sounds, going ''burton, burton,
burton'' all the time. So I guess I was going ''burton, burton,
burton'' on the day of the bomb; and Father was in his study,
playing with a loop of string.
"It so happens I know where the string he was playing with came
from. Maybe you can use it somewhere in your book. Father took the
string from around the manuscript of a novel that a man in prison
had sent him. The novel was about the end of the world in the year
2000, and the name of the book was 2000 A.D. It told about how mad
scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped out the whole world.
There was a big sex orgy when everybody knew that the world was
going to end, and then Jesus Christ Himself appeared ten seconds
before the bomb went off. The name of the author was Marvin Sharpe
Holderness, and he told Father in a covering letter the he was in
prison for killing his own brother. He sent the manuscript to
Father because he couldn''t figure out what kind of explosives to
put in the bomb. He thought maybe Father could make
suggestions.
"I don''t mean to tell you I read the book when I was six. We had it
around the house for years. My brother Frank made it his personal
property, on account of the dirty parts. Frank kept it hidden in
what he called his ''wall safe'' in his bedroom. Actually, it wasn''t
a safe but just an old stove flue with a tin lid. Frank and I must
have read the orgy part a thousand times when we were kids. We had
it for years, and then my sister Angela found it. She read it
an...
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