Deconstructed Fiction And Constructed Reality

As a landmark in American modern literature history,Kurt Vonnegut wrote more than 10 novels and many different short essays and commentaries during his life.Among them,Slaughterhouse-Five is generally seen as his masterpiece.Until now,it is still warmly welcomed by many critics and researchers home and abroad.Nevertheless,few researchers have put their attention to the overall metafiction narration skills.Based on this situation,the thesis will analyze the overall metafiction narration in Slaughterhouse-Five with five chapters.Except for the introduction and conclusion chapter,the body part is constituted by characteristics of metafiction,narrative structures and narrative techniques of Slaughterhouse-Five.Unlike other metafiction works,Slaughterhouse-Five is very special because Vonnegut devoted himself to deconstruction and construction at the same time in his novel.Thus in chapter three,two kinds of metafiction narrative structures will be discussed to show how Vonnegut deconstructed the fiction,which are nonlinear narration and hybrid narration.Likewise in chapter four,some examples of narrative techniques such as parody,collage,repetition and descriptions for details will be listed to illustrate how Vonnegut constructed the reality.At last in chapter five,it comes to the conclusion chapter.Readers can realize that on the one hand,the metafiction narrative structures help Vonnegut deconstruct the fiction;on the other hand,some metafiction narrative techniques help him construct the reality at the same time.In this way,Vonnegut made a great contribution to the theories and practice of metafiction.