Constructing "Slaughterhouse-Five" E-Book

Marc Regler

• Herausgeber: GRIN Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2003

Beschreibung

Seminar paper from the year 2003 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2,3 (B), University of Stuttgart (American Studies), course: Postmodern Fiction, language: English, abstract: Constructing Slaughterhouse-Five is a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. It puts a special focus on the aspects of time and temporal structure in relation to the novel form and its narrative structure in relation to the protagonist Billy Pilgrim's personal trauma, his war experience and his time travelling in relation to the alternative model of time of the Tralfamadorians. Thus, it concentrates on the postmodernist criticism of an uncritical believe in linear time, teleology and progression as also represented in the form of linear narratives.

Leseprobe

Table of Content

1. Introduction

2. Telling the tale.

2. 1. Telling the unimaginable

2.2. The fiction of reality.

2.2.1. Mary O’Hare, war books and Roland Weary.

2.2.2. The Children’s Crusade and history

2.3. Presenting a personal reality

3.1. The Tralfamadorian novel

4. Unstuck in time

4.1. Billy and his story

4.2. Billy, time and Tralfamadorian time

4.2.1. Billy and the logic of Dresden.

5. Conclusion

6. Literature

Page 1

Universität Stuttgart American Studies Postmodern Fiction Wintersemester 2002/2003 Date of Submission: 28/05/2003

Page 3

1. Introduction

The plot, cause-and-effect, development, choice and time are all concepts based on linearity. They are all considered truths for a narrative as well as reality and the individual’s perception of reality. But what if an experience, a memory or an event is so traumatic and grave that it is not possible to depict it adequately in such a form? With this comes the awareness that the convention of linearity, which is dominant in language, narratives and the designing of experience, is not always the sufficient way to describe reality. This is one of the main problems ofSlaughterhouse-Five,which is a book about the bombing of Dresden and about writing about the bombing of Dresden, as critics agree. It is also a book that is aware of how the conceptualization of such an event in a narrative is an analogous process to the individual’s conceptualization of such an event in creating its own reality. There is a reciprocal link between fiction prescribing reality and reality prescribing fiction, linearity being one aspect of that.