Seeking A Collapsing "Slaughterhouse"

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007), one of the most influential and prolific writers of the twentieth century, has produced more than a dozen novels, short stories, essays and plays during his 50 years of writing career. Among his 14 novels, the best-known ones include The Sirens of Titan (1959), Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), and Timequake (1997). Through modern and postmodern techniques, Vonnegut expresses the deep concerns and deliberations on human condition and existence. Besides, he likes to use science fiction elements as a means to deliver his views on a dismal and jumbled world and a collapsing life.Published in 1969, Slaughterhouse-Five is Kurt Vonnegut's representative novel, and it won him a reputation as a major American writer. It is drawn from his personal war-time experiences as a prisoner of war in Germany during World War II—a tragedy putting the death toll above 130,000 people. The horror of witnessing the firebombing of Dresden haunts Vonnegut and the subsequent laboring days in the ruins intensified his emotional trauma. Postmodern science fiction should be a more suitable genre category label for this novel. Having successfully experimented with a new pattern of narrative by mixing postmodernist poetics with SF elements, Slaughterhouse-Five reflects a jumbled world of uncertainty and has been a best-seller.As a postmodern science fiction, the innovative narrative features of Slaughterhouse-Five are attractive and significant. Produced and published during the late 50s and early 60s of the 20th century, it bears the marking of the two tendencies of"the postmodernization of science fiction"and"the science-fictionalization of postmodernism". As a"mainstream"writer, Vonnegut creates a merged intertext by integrating postmodern and SF elements, displaying unique narrative features. This thesis is divided into five sections in total. In the Introduction part, the literary review is made, which provides the theoretical basis for the thesis.The first chapter introduces the author Kurt Vonnegut, the historical context of Slaughterhouse-Five and its plot overview.The second chapter aims to clarify the interaction between postmodernism and SF with three subparts: SF and its development, postmodernism and its features, and the interaction between SF and postmodernism. The first two provide sufficient background knowledge for the understanding of the interaction which occurs inevitably. Since New Wave around the early 1960s, postmodernism and popular SF began their"literary friendship". On the one hand, many key postmodernist figures including Kurt Vonnegut variously appropriate, adapt, exploit, and deconstruct the material, motifs, and discourses of SF in some way. Postmodernism cherishes the slogan of"Anything goes". On the other hand, SF is open to developments in postmodernist writing and accelerates its pace of change. These two tendencies promote SF's literary status, making it no longer be a noncanonical, subliterary genre. What's more, postmodern science fiction brings a new aesthetic dimension.Chapter Three is the key part of this thesis. It studies and illustrates in details the five narrative features in Slaughterhouse-Five, including two narrators, writing styles, nonlinear narrative, the use of fragmentation, and the elements of SF.Slaughterhouse-Five overthrows the traditional narrative ways. It contains two narrators. Using repetition, irony and dark humor convey a simple, straightforward and ironic writing style. Refusing to conform to assumptions of cause-and-effect and rigidities of time and substance with beginning, middle, climax, and end, this novel adopts non-linear narrative with time skipping to represent the jumbled Dresden massacre and reality. Fragmentation brings the effects of dissociation, juxtaposition, and discontinuity. Fragmentation of time, structure and character unifies the non-linear narrative, makes the novel have no organic structure or center, and projects all the events into chaos, forcing the reader to actively create meaning out of it. SF elements of space travel, aliens and the planet make a positive contribution to the postmodern narrative. Vonnegut sets space travel as the synchronous occurrence to what happens on the Earth. Thus a SF frame is created and the condition for the slippages and segues between one identity and another, one memory and another, one culture and another through the Earth to the planet are reasonably built. Aliens Tralfamadorians act as the guides to teach the"lessons"that Vonnegut wants to emphasize to Billy and to the novel's readers, including the unusual narrative structure,the moral of the novel and Vonnegut's idea of fatalism. The Planet Tralfamadore symbolizing the Garden of Eden is the ontological confrontation with our Earth. Through the SF narrative, Vonnegut not only enlarges the room of human imagination bringing out the fancy and fantastic effect to attract reader's eyeballs, but also explains clearly the underlying principles and ideas for constructing this jumbled and complex narration.Finally, it is the conclusion. The postmodern science fiction Slaughterhouse-Five's popularity and charm result from its unique narrative features by integrating postmodern techniques and SF. Its trippy narrator,its indelible ironic tone, its non-linear narrative, its fragmented text, and its bold, even hilarious use of SF help the reader seek and finally picture in the mind a"slaughterhouse", a dismal world and a collapsing life, falling apart.