The Rebellious Inheritance

Black humor, which is called “gallows humor” in the western critics, is wellknown as a symbol of post-war literary genre with “Lost Generation” and “BeatGeneration”.Joseph Heller(1923-1997), is the founder of black humor literature in Americaand also one of its representative writers, and his work CATCH-22can be regarded asthe essence of American black humor novels. Heller’s novels reflect some features oftraditional novels as well as some features of “Postmodemism”. The black humor inhis work not only enriched the contents of aesthetics，but also broadened the visionsof aesthetic judgementWhile Kurt Vonnegut(1922-2007), an another important writer who enjoys quitehigh prestige，has made great contributions to the development of black humorliterature. Among a quite large number of works by Vonneugt all his life，“Slaughterhouse Five” achieves widely critical acclaim and lays the foundation for hisposition in the American literary world. In this novel, he put the subject matter andformat of his science fictions in the frame of postmodernism, and thus has establishedabrand-new narrative context. At the same time, he created a new literature form byinjecting black humor and moral signifiance into the form of science fiction.On one hand,the pattern of fiction writing in black humor novels which seemsboth unorthodox and unconventional, supplies reader with vast reading space. At thesame time, the author finds the best access to expressing his own serious thoughtsand revealing the social illogicalities by reflecting the reality with multi-stratificationsand multi-colors. On another hand,black humor embody deep and serious theme byseemingly mildirony and the characterization of the silly anti-heroes. By analyzing thetwo representative novels---CATCH-22and SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE, this articleinterprets the rebellious spirit and cultureinheritance of American black humorliterature from a perspective of holistic research mainly in three parts. Chapter One investigates the challenges brought by black humor to traditionalliterature from the aspects of content, form and characterization, and then analyzes itsinheritance and development to the traditional literature covered by rebellious spiriton appearance by taking CATCH-22and SLAUGHTERHOUSE-FIVE as examples.Chapter Two firstly draw a conclusion through analyzing the literary artisticdistinctive characteristics of black humor that its is neither traditional comedy nortraditional tragedy in artistic charactristic. Then through combing the context, theauthor refutes the traditional cognition that black humor is based on the distortion andexaggeration of absurd world.Chapter Three analyses the reason why humane notions of black humor has beenpassed on from economy, socio-culture,psychology etc.