“Slaughterhouse-Five” Performed by James Franco

Academy Award-nominated actor James Franco (127 Hours, Milk) performs Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical classic Slaughterhouse-Five available exclusively from Audible on November 3. Listeners can order the audiobook now at audible.com/vonnegut.

Earlier this year Audible released Breakfast of Champions, performed by John Malkovich, and other essential Vonnegut titles including Deadeye Dick, Bluebeard, Hocus Pocus, Palm Sunday and The Sirens of Titan to celebrate the visionary author’s life’s work. Other Vonnegut titles including Jailbird, Slapstick, Wampeters, Foma & Granfallons and Fates Worse Than Death have been released along with Franco’s performance of Slaughterhouse-Five.

Listen to an excerpt at Soundcloud: https://soundcloud.com/audible/slaughterhouse-five/s-oAxcX

Slaughterhouse-Five is one of legendary author Kurt Vonnegut’s most popular novels. Franco brilliantly brings to life the story of Billy Pilgrim, who becomes “unstuck in time” after he is captured by German soldiers during World War II.

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.