By making himself a character, Vonnegut shows how personal this story is for
him and encourages the reader to interpret the novel as the reality of a person
who experienced horrific events. The novel is clearly fictional, with elements
of science fiction. But if the narrator is also the author, then we can
interpret the book as a coping mechanism for a real-life person who endured
terrible things. When the narrator says, “That was I. That was me. That was the
author of this book” (160), the reader is then forced to wonder what other
elements of the book apply to Vonnegut, leading to a deeper appreciation of the
novel.
Also, when Vonnegut makes himself a character, he places
Slaughterhouse-Five strongly in the camp of postmodernism. There is a lot to say about postmodernism in literature, but, briefly, it is a movement that sees the carefully ordered structure of...
Unlock This Answer Now
Start your 48-hour free trial and get ahead in class. Boost your grades with access to expert answers and top-tier study guides. Thousands of students are already mastering their assignments—don't miss out. Cancel anytime.
Already a member? Log in here.
early literature as too ordered and too structured and believes that there is nothing else to say in that style. Postmodern literature tends to follow non-linear story progression, avoids the pretentiousness that may come along with earlier fiction, and generally pushes boundaries in writing. Sound familiar?
Through Slaughterhouse-Five and his other novels, Vonnegut shows that he is not interested in following the literary rules of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and including himself as a character is just one example of this.
Further reading on styles in literature:
Kurt Vonnegut, in writing Slaughterhouse-Five, looked upon the task as a cathartic experience. The key to understanding this novel is in the preface, which is entirely autobiographical, and in which Vonnegut relates the history of his decision to write a novel inspired from his experiences in World War II. And, make no mistake, those experiences were harrowing. Vonnegut, while a prisoner-of-war in Germany, and being held in the city of Dresden, emerged from captivity to gaze upon a scene of destruction that rivaled, as he himself noted, the devastation from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The firebombing of Dresden by Allied air forces caused a level of destruction commensurate with that experienced by residents of those two Japanese cities, and it left an indelible impression upon the young soldier. As he relates his impressions regarding that single incident from the war, he emphasizes the incomprehensibility of the scale and nature of the bombing, and of the surrealistic experience of surviving it:
“It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds. And what do the birds say? All there is to say about a massacre, things like ‘Poo-tee-tweet’.”
The final line in Slaughterhouse-Five is, again, “Poo-tee-tweet.” Vonnegut is left with little to add other than to reemphasize the incomprehensibility of the devastation wrought by human beings during World War II. He employs first-person narrative because it is a uniquely personal story, in which he is hoping to attain some greater understanding through the process of writing, but to no avail. As he notes in his “novel,” “all this happened, more or less.” Billy Pilgrim is Vonnegut’s fictional alter-ego, but Pilgrim’s story is interspersed with Vonnegut’s own. Slaughterhouse-Five employs Vonnegut’s voice because it his story.