The Carnivalesque Values In Slaughterhouse Five

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) is one of the most important postmodernist novelists in contemporary literary history of America, regarded as a representative of"black humor". Many of his novels are familiar to Chinese readers, such as Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat's Cradle, Breakfast of Champions and Jailbird. With the bombing of Dresden in World Warâ…¡as historical background, the author tries to illustrate the cruelty of the war through Billy's life experience and provide profound reflections over the fate of the humankind in his masterpiece entitled Slaughterhouse-Five. The author combines history, reality and his own imagination together through such techniques as metafiction, collage and deconstruction, which reflect the postmodern aesthetic features. Many critics have been attracted to comment on this novel since its publication. Owning to the diversification of his writing skills, many critics direct their attention to a sole aspect of the postmodern techniques and thus ignore a comprehensive and complex analysis. This thesis acts as a comprehensive study of Slaughterhouse-Five, employing Bakhtin's carnivalesque theory in order to uncover the carnivalesque features of the work so that more profound connotations may be illustrated, and thus explored are the literary characters, genres collage combined into heteroglossia, polyphony feature and carnivalesque chronotope. The analysis is based on the text and illuminates the carnivalesque feature with particular and typical examples which serves to reinforce the theoretical arguments and abstract analyses, and eventually comes to a conclusion that the structure of the novel is in dialogue mode, where the folk discourses overthrow the authorities, and the arrangement of the novel adopts the decrowning structure which reflects the spirit of the free, the equal and the changeful.