A New Historicism Study Of Slaughterhouse-Five

Black humor novel, the most important postmodern school, greatly influenced American literature in the 20th century. As the representative black humor writer in his generation, Kurt Vonnegut produced fourteen novels in his long writing career. His works reflect the culture, politics and society of America from different angles. This thesis studies Slaughterhouse-Five from new historicism perspective, hoping to open a new perspective to assess Vonnegut and his works.The argumentation of this paper, proposed in Chapter One, is that Vonnegut and new historicism share three main notions: historicity of text, the textuality of the histories and political commitments of literary texts. In Chapter Two and Three, the primary notions of new historicism are stated firstly and then based on the theory of new historicism, it is proved by analyzing the texts and narrative skills of Slaughterhouse-Five that Vonnegut interweaved the historical texts and events and played as the author and character in this novel to show that the border of history and literature is ambiguous and explore the relation between history and fiction, indicating that the fiction can be beyond history to a certain extent and leading the readers to reexamine the history. In Chapter Four, basing on the third shared notion: political commitments of literary texts, the power relations and Vonnegut's political attitude are analyzed in Slaughterhouse-Five. To get a comparatively complete study, this chapter also analyzes American politics and culture in Vonnegut's novels. Then a conclusion is drawn that his works filled with various political issues are the carrier of power relations of new historicism.All in all, this thesis, based on the shared notions of Vonnegut and new historicism, focuses its main attention on Slaughterhouse-Five, indicating that Vonnegut's thought about the relation between history and literature and his strong political commitment in the novels distinguishes him from his contemporary American writers. And it will provide a new angle to further study on Vonnegut.