Trauma In Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Within days, France and Great Britain had declared war against Germany. Over the course of the next six years, World War II touched every continent on the globe, with the exception of unpopulated Antarctica (“World War II Timeline”). The effects of this “great war” are still felt throughout the world today in both tangible and intangible ways. The field of Trauma Studies was in its infancy at the onset of this war. Sigmund Freud, Josef Breuer, and a handful of other European physicians and psychologists had recently begun to study and theorize upon the potential effects of war on the human psyche. The concept of traumatic neurosis, which was “discovered” through the study of hysteria in

But while some readers will see the elements of fantasy in this novel as just that, others will recognize them as representations of the internal dissociation and detachment from reality experienced by the narrative’s protagonist. In this chapter, I will examine the representation of trauma as dissociation in Slaughterhouse-Five. I will focus on Vonnegut and Slaughterhouse-Five for a number of reasons. First, the representations of trauma found within this text are similar to those in many other World War II narratives in that emotional and cognitive dissociation are central to the depiction of war-related trauma. Second, the lag time from Vonnegut’s war experiences to his writing of Slaughterhouse-Five is indicative of the intense dissociation he suffered during war. Lastly, Slaughterhouse-Five has had a major cultural and literary impact through its large readership and adaptation into a major motion picture. Through this examination of Slaughterhouse-Five, I contend that dissociation was the most common mode of trauma representation for World War II narratives largely because it was identified as the primary symptom of traumatic neurosis at the time of World War II. I further contend that the lack of interpretive consensus over this novel is due to the lack of public

While the group of POW’s is stationed in Dresden, the Allied Forces firebomb the city, killing over 130,000 people. This bombing, although largely unknown to the American public, was the most “successful” bombing executed by the Allied Forces, killing more people than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima. The POW’s only survived because they were kept in an airtight slaughterhouse cooler during the attack. After the attack, they are forced, by the few surviving German soldiers, to excavate and bury the bodies of the dead Germans, who were mostly civilians. We are then shown, through Pilgrim’s time travels into the future, that after the war he returns to Ilium, where he becomes an optometrist. He is engaged to Valencia Merble, the daughter of the optometry school’s founder. After recovering from a nervous breakdown that lands him in a mental institution, Pilgrim marries Valencia. The two live an opulent life and raise two children