| Kurt Vbnnegut, Jr. (1922-2007) was active in his artistic interaction with American life in the later half of the 20th century, and rose to fame with the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five: or the Children's Crusade, a Duty Dance with Death (1969), the sixth of his fourteen novels. Published at the height of the war in Vietnam, Slaughterhouse-Five captured the imaginations of enough readers—especially young ones—to make Vonnegut for a time a most popular writer in the United States. If as Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, Uncle Tom's Cabin had so deeply affected the public perception of the prevalent racial issues that Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel helped start the American Civil War, Slaughterhouse-Five, along with non-fictional events like the Tet Offensive and Kent State, helped the United States out of the Vietnam War.Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Vonnegut's personal experience in World WarⅡ, is a novel both about the Dresden holocaust, a most traumatic event in Vonnegut's life, and about the process of recalling it and putting it into words. The Second World War and the Dresden firebombing traumatized Vonnegut so greatly and deeply that for over two decades he struggled between the impossibility to forget it and the difficulty in recalling it, and a desire to sincerely report what he had seen during the war. Eventually, he broke the silence and finished writing Slaughterhouse-Five, a book about a great event which seemed so hard to tell.In this novel, Vonnegut seeks a self-conscious break with the past tradition and successfully employs unconventional non-linear narration to construct the traumatic memories of the author and his protagonist, Billy Pilgrim. Breaking the spatio-temporal limits and combining history and imagination, reality and fiction, Vonnegut successfully connects the three worlds together: the author's real world, Billy Pilgrim's daily life and the distant planet of Trafalmadore. And in doing so, Vonnegut reinvents his and Billy's traumatic memories caused by the atrocities of the war, and challenges literary possibilities and theoretical limits of trauma, memory, time, and history in ways that call forth more attention from postmodern theorists. My thesis studies the nexus between memory and fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five, discussing the ways Kurt Vonnegut and his protagonist Billy Pilgrim recollect and construct their traumatic memories through fiction-making, and further points out that the fantahistorical elements, that is, the purposeful blurring of fiction and history, is at the center of Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five.My thesis is divided into five parts including the Introduction and Conclusion.The Introduction involves a brief analysis of Vonnegut's position and achievement in American literature, as well as a brief literature review, retrospecting the studies at home and abroad about Vonnegut's works in general as well as Slaughterhouse-Five.In the first chapter, I lay the foundation for the entire study, focusing on Dresden as a tragic historical topic and the motif of Slaughterhouse-Five. The Allied bombing of Dresden toward the end of World WarⅡ, claiming the lives of a large quantity of people, becomes the core of the anguish on the author's mind, and thus prompts him to write the novel for consolation and self-cure. And Vonnegut weaves his views upon war, death and human nature in Slaughterhouse-Five.In Chapter Two, I provide a close analysis of the memory reconstruction in the novel, and prove that fiction-writing can be a means to work through a traumatic personal experience. Firstly, I explain the unspeakable traumatic memory which the firebombing of Dresden burned into author and protagonist, that is, on Vonnegut himself and Billy Pilgrim. Then I proceed to their respective imagination and reinvention (Billy's fabrication of Tralfamadore and Vonnegut's writing of the novel) for healing their war-scarred and death-haunted mental damage. Further, I assert that spatio-temporal simultaneity plays a very important role in both fabricated stories, providing a metaphorical arena in which Vonnegut and Billy stage the effects of war trauma and the process of their self-cure.Chapter Three is a brief study of the relationship between memory, history, and fiction in Slaughterhouse-Five, with "fabrication" as the bond welding them together. And I hold that this novel is also a text that summons up the ethical imperative of remembering historical atrocities such as the destruction of Dresden, which reveals Vonnegut's sincere human concerns about the cruel and absurd universe. As I show, such an ethical imperative is expressed in a history fantasy in which narrator intrusion, matafiction techniques, historical facts and science-fiction topoi are fused but, significantly, not confused.The Conclusion reasserts that reality is relative and arbitrary, and that Slaughterhouse-Five, as a constructed memorial of the Dresden firebombing, blurs the boundary of "truth" (history facts) and "lies" (fictional writing). Through the fantahistorical reinvention, Vonnegut performs his ethical action which denies fatalism and quietism. In this part I also attempt to analyze Vonnegut's diminishing position in American literature from the context of the second phase of postmodernism.The current studies of Slaughterhouse-Five mostly focus on its anti-war theme, science fiction elements, religious ideology and postmodern writing techniques, while there is an inadequacy in discussing the fictional essence of history reflected in this novel. This thesis, from the angle of constructing traumatic memory, attempts to probe into the fictionality and plasticity of history and memory, and thus offers a comparatively new perspective in understanding Vonnegut and his Slaughterhouse-Five.
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