Pursuit Of Peaceful Society-a Study Of Meta-fictional Narrative Strategies In Slaughterhouse Five

Regarded as one of the most prominent and prolific postmodernist writers Kurt Vonnegut,who is a representative of American postmodernist literature. His works play a positive role inthe development of American postmodernist literature. He has been ignored by literary circleonce upon a time before the publication of Slaughterhouse Five. However it is SlaughterhouseFive that brings him reputation and fortune. Slaughterhouse Five published in1969, isconsidered as his masterpiece and is also viewed as a typical metafiction because of itsuniqueness of structure and innovations of art, which attracts much attention. In the novel,Kurt Vonnegut gets rid of the traditional way of writing and tries his best to experiment withhis new style of fiction writing. Although some researchers have studied this novel from theangle of metafiction. In my opinion, a deeper and much more systematic analysis is quiteessential.This thesis is made up of five chapters. Chapter One is an introduction to KurtVonnegut’s life, his works, and the brief introduction of his works Slaughterhouse Five, andthe introduction to the literature review of Slaughterhouse Five, and shows the significance ofthis thesis.Chapter Two is the brief introduction of the background, definitions of metafiction andthe main narrative strategies of metafiction in this thesis, including self-reflexivity, parody,shift of time-space, montage, collage.Chapter Three to Chapter Four are the main body of the thesis. These two chapters makea detailed analysis of Slaughterhouse Five using the typical metafictional narrative strategiesmentioned above, meanwhile study the metafictional themes of this novel, and lay bare theuncertain relationship between fiction and reality, the overlapping of history and fiction andnew relationship between reading and writing.And the last chapter is the conclusion of my thesis. By means of analyzingSlaughterhouse Five from perspectives of self-reflexivity, parody, shift of time-space,montage, collage, we get a conclusion that Slaughterhouse Five is a great model ofmetafiction. At the same time, this thesis will provide the readers with deeper understandingof the novel, which attracts more readers to study the prominent postmodernist writer KurtVonnegut and his works further.