Working Through Trauma

Kurt Vonnegut (1922- ) is an influential novelist in contemporary American literature. He has been described by British novelist Graham Greene as"one of the best living American writers."Slaughterhouse-Five published in 1969 is his first novel to gain wide critical and popular acclaim and is surely his best achievement. Slaughterhouse-Five triggers a great echo in the literature field since its publication,receiving a front-page review in the prestigious The New York Times Book Review and rising quickly to the Times best-seller list. What's more, it had been used in classroom across the country, starting a craze for Vonnegut among college students. This is so mainly because it was published at a time when Americans were concerned with the war in Vietnam, giving the realistic reflection to the social condition of the 1960s.Slaughterhouse-Five, based on Vonnegut's personal experience in World War II, is a novel about the Dresden massacre and about the process of writing Dresden. The Dresden bombing brings him so extreme psychic trauma that it takes him over twenty years to address his own experience as a prisoner of war.Recently many critics have done thorough research to the novel's structure, theme, and narrative techniques and so on. But they often neglect the special writing background of Slaughterhouse-Five, which is that Vonnegut creates it because of his own war trauma. Furthermore, the scientific study of trauma started from the end of the 19th century by a group of psychologists such as Sigmund Freud. But trauma theory emerged in the United States in the early 1990s with Judith Herman, Cathy Caruth being the representatives. This thesis attempts to make a refreshing analysis of Slaughterhouse-Five from the perspective of trauma theory as well as some narrative techniques, pointing out that Vonnegut's writing constructs American victims'psychic trauma after the World War II. Treating Slaughterhouse-Five as trauma narrative, we notice that trauma writer attempts to work through trauma through writing his personal experiences.This thesis consists of five parts: Introduction, four chapters and conclusion. The introductory part presents a brief introduction to Kurt Vonnegut's life and the sketch of Slaughterhouse-Five. Furthermore, this thesis determines a new research perspective by the analysis of research on the novel at both home and abroad. Chapter one begins an overview of trauma and trauma theory, this thesis narrates the historical development of trauma conceptualization as well as its relationship with fiction. And it offers Vonnegut's trauma narratives based on his own war experiences. Chapter two analyzes narrator and protagonist's psychic trauma through the closing reading of Slaughterhouse-Five. Chapter Three aims at analyzing the novel's structure, relating frame and embedded narratives to trauma representation in Slaughterhouse-Five. It also analyzes how Vonnegut manages to extend the representation of personal trauma to the exploration of collective trauma through the relevance of narrative levels to his own personal experiences. Chapter Four is devoted to the discussion of the relationship between survival and trauma and the recovery process through writing his own traumatic experiences. In the conclusion, Vonnegut constructs and expresses traumatic experiences. Slaughterhouse-Five is a combination of testimonies and imagination. It concludes with the significance of the present study to arrive at a much more comprehensive interpretation of Slaughterhouse-Five through this new perspective.