Juxtaposition In Slaughterhouse-Five

Vonnegut as the author and narrator of the novel removes the doubt in the first chapter that not everything we read in Slaughterhouse-Five is true through the first words of the novel: “All this happened, more or less.” This opening line introduce the readers with Vonnegut story mixed with real and fictional events, a future which is blurred by past, time jumps from inner space and outer space and even human ethics verses extraterrestrial morals. Vonnegut managed to create a collision of these strange juxtaposition with true historical events narrated in an ironical voice. Victorious and glorious historical events such as “The Florence on the Elbe”, Sodom and Gomorrah down to WWII are portrayed with a humble language and through multidimensional

Terrible incidents continue to follow Billy such as the loss of his wife in a car accident and later survived an airplane crash with heavily injures in his head. Surviving a terrible war and terrible postwar experiences made Billy spend some time in a mental hospital and all of a sudden he began talking about his imaginary race Tralfamadorian. In a mental hospital Billy socializes with another patient, Eliot Rosewater, a repeated character of Vonnegut’s previous novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, where he is introduces to the works of the science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout especially with the novel The Big Board, which creates out the scenario of his later adventures on Tralfamadore.

In Slaughterhouse-Five, Vonnegut leaves the reader decide the implication of the science fiction in his novel whether it is used as a strategic means to remove attention from the horror of Dresden atrocity or it is simply a product of schizophrenic mind of his character to flee from harsh reality to a fantastic