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Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Literary Analysis

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As a writer, the way a story is told can be the key factor to properly transferring the novel’s message to the readers. From point of view to the lapse in time, every little factor plays into the overall impact of the novel. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse Five, the use of a presumably time-traveling main character is a factor that did more to benefit the overall message of the novel than it did harm it. This is a shocking revelation because a character of doubtable sound mind would not be expected to properly narrate a story of this depth. But what is even more staggering is that this scattered narrator may be what truly brings the message of the book to life.
Reliability of a narrator tends to fixate on the information that the narrator is exposed to and what they divulge to the readers. In the case of Slaughterhouse Five, the dependability of the narrator is questionable seeing as the soundness of their mind is an iffy debate. This argument is unexpected seeing as the narrator is most often expected to carry all knowledge of their world, but in this novel the information they indulge the readers with is scattered and seemingly a hallucination at times. It all started with one of the first lines of the fictional portion of the book: “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time” (23). While this addition of lapses between times in the narrator’s life is an intelligent maneuver by the writer to compare …show more content…

It is a crucial aspect to expressing how the events cannot be truly grasped by those who have not experienced it, and it does so in a way that still manages to showcase the depth of the story. It is an intelligent maneuver, no matter the questionable reliability of the narrator’s mind, to better reveal how similar events impacted the soldiers and truly how “there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre”

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