Intertextuality In Slaughterhouse-Five Trout

Kilgore Trout is one such creation the author keeps employed for some time, and the different ways in which he used indicate Vonnegut’s transition from sub generic formulas to increasingly personal structures, a move paralleling his own change in status from a neglected and virtually unknown write to one of the country’s most famous public spokesmen.

In Slaughterhouse-Five Trout’s personal appearance comes almost near the end of the novel but his stories and novels are referred to throughout the novel, creating a true sense of intertextuality by which the effect of Vonnegut’s own narrative is multiplied several fold.

Kilgore Trout's novels, of which Rosewater has an extensive collection, explore another way Billy looks and constructs the world, one which is not determined by a collective, by society, or by logic. The fact that sanity is connected to the same society that can bomb a city (killing nearly 150,000 people who were not fighting and have no connection to the war)

Vonnegut, in this respect, is like Yon Yonson. According to James Lundquist, he is also caught in the same impasse as that of the song (76-77) . For more than twenty years Vonnegut attempted to compile his Dresden experiences into a book. When people asked Vonnegut what he is working on, he told them that for years the same answer-a book about Dresden. Similar to Yon Yonson, Vonnegut felt doomed to repeat the same answer endlessly. Whereas the maddening song suggests also something else- the tendency many people have to return to a central point in their lives in reply to the question of identity. Vonnegut himself like Yon Yonson, felt a compulsively return, moving back and forth on their lines, the story goes around and around, yet it still leads somewhere and the end is very similar to the