Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Essay

The purpose of this essay is to present postmodernist features in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse - Five, features such as the presence of metafiction, science fiction, the anti-hero in a war novel, non-linear timeline. What follows is an explanation of some particular postmodernist characteristics which make Vonnegut's novel break the boundaries of a sole concept or category. Postmodernism is a late 20th-century style and concept in arts, architecture, and criticism, which represents a departure from modernism and is characterized by the self-conscious use of earlier styles and conventions, a mixing of different artistic styles and media, and a general distrust of theories.(Oxford Dictionaries) Postmodernism relies on such literary conventions

While the author makes his protagonist visit an alien planet and travel through time, Vonnegut himself was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time and he describes the tragic events using the eye-witness technique. Instead of writing a memoir or a manifesto, Vonnegut chose to portray realistic events, fictitiously, even fantastically, by inventing the character of Billy Pillgrim, who becomes 'unstuck in time' throughout his life, is abducted by aliens and witnesses the destruction of Dresden (Vonnegut,

Metafiction is a fiction in which the author self-consciously alludes to the artificiality or literariness of a work by parodying or departing from novelistic conventions and traditional narrative techniques. (Oxford Dictionaries) It is the process of the novel's own making, the implied voice of the author (Draga). We have the author explaining how he wrote the book and inserts himself into the fiction. 'That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book. (Vonnegut, 62). As a Postmodern novel using metafiction, the first chapter of Slaughterhouse - Five is a writer's preface about how he came to write his novel. The narrator uses black humor to mock the realist narrator. The writer apologizes because the novel is "so short, jumbled and jangled", because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre" (Vonnegut, 13). Postmodernist writers employ this technique to undermine the existence of the narrative primacy within the text, unlike realism. The first sentence of the novel reads: "All this happened more or less" (Vonnegut, 1). Like other postmodernist authors who started from the grand narrative only to discover that it is dead, Vonnegut was at an impasse. He uses the postmodernist solution of rewriting the old writings, presenting the fiction as artificial: literature is constructed, life is constructed, thus everything is