| Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ) is an important yet often controversial figure in the contemporary American literary field. Recently, many critical works on Vonnegut have been published, and many critics have come to believe that more comprehensive researches should be carried out. Slaughterhouse-Five, the sixth novel of Vonnegut, is his highest achievement and one of the most acclaimed works in postmodern American literature. It is equally acclaimed as a classic postmodern black humor fiction, besides Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow.Although the novel's complexity on content and its innovation on form attracted a great deal of critics' interest in studying, few of them merge the content-study and the form-study together, or make researches on how these deviant narrative techniques affect the thematic meaning of this novel. In hope of contributing some new insights into the ongoing Vonnegut studies, the present thesis tentatively takes his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) as its study object, and uses Gerard Genette's and Rimmon-Kenan's theories of narratology as the theoretical framework to analyze these deviant narrative techniques under a particular historical context in the 1960s' America.Though lots of deviant narrative techniques are discernable in this novel, the author's non-traditional deviations on narrative sequence, narrator and narrative levels serve the theme of this novel and express the author's intention. Within the theoretical frame work of Genette's and Rimmon-Kenan's theory, the thesis firstly analyzes the disordered narrative sequence of this novel. Its non-traditional jumbled narrative sequence joints a series of fragmented historical events which lack continuity and coherence among each other. In this world, we know nothing about the cause, or the effect of the event which is happening now, because it is composed by a series of spatialized accidents in which the temporality and causality is negated and the predictability of history is robbed. Secondly, the effect of the narrator's double identities is studied. In this novel, Vonnegut, as the homodiegetic narrator, experiences and witnesses the horrifying Dresden event, while at the same time, as the extradiegetic narrator, Vonnegut creates a fictive character Billy Pilgrim who fictively experiences the same event in the story Vonnegut narrates. By blurring the boundary between the fact and the fiction, the "truth" of history is fictionalized and becomes an uncertain one. Thirdly, the narrative level of this novel is studied. Rather than a traditional single level, Slaughterhouse-Five can be divided into three narrative levels, namely, the historical world where the author lives, the fictional world where Billy lives, and the fictional Tralfamadorian world which exists in Billy's mind. As the historical world is set against the fictional world and Billy's life experience against his fantastic invention, an intense interplay between fiction and fact is thus brought to focus, revealing both the author's therapeutic need of imagination and his concern about the loss of the religious and moral solace.These three distinctive narrative techniques, which are used intentionally in this internal fictional-world by Kurt Vonnegut, pave the way for exposing the theme of the novel which implicates a postwar atmosphere of historical uncertainty and moral ambiguity pervading in the external real world after WWII and reveals Vonnegut's pessimism and fatalism toward this cruel reality. From the perspective of the narrative techniques in this novel, the present thesis is expected to be helpful for the exploration of Kurt Vonnegut's motifs and his attitude to the human beings' existent condition and to the further study which enriches the previous criticisms on Slaughterhouse-Five. Besides, this methodology of analyzing narrative techniques is also expected to be referential when used to analyze other postwar literary works.
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