SLAUGHTERHOUSE 5 POO TEE WEET FREE
Through an examination of Vonnegut’s treatment of free will and determinism in three of his signature texts, The Sirens of Titan, Cat’s Cradle, and Slaughterhouse-Five, this study reveals a tension between the two philosophies in the author’s work. By overstating the influence of existentialism on Vonnegut’s novels, critics have neglected the influence of determinism on his work, and this neglect disconnects the author from his American literature roots of naturalism. In spite of the critical insistence on Vonnegut’s existential or deterministic philosophy, little work has been done to develop either of these ideas, and strictly through critical repetition, Vonnegut’s work has become more closely associated with French existentialism than with the determinism of American literary naturalism. These two labels recur frequently in Vonnegut criticism with little or no explanation as to how they apply to his novels. Over the years, critics have noticed two antithetical tendencies in Kurt Vonnegut’s work: one toward existentialism and another toward determinism. Furthermore, I take "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim" as indicative here of wider problems in trauma studies, and suggest an interpretive procedure that, while maintaining an awareness of the critical capabilities of trauma theory, is firstly rooted in literary rather than psychiatric analysis. While she succeeds in aspects of this "diagnosis," I argue that the essay as a whole struggles under significant overreaching, and a somewhat clumsy handling of supposedly central theories. Drawing on a host of psychiatric case studies and theorists, Vees-Gulani convincingly connects the "spastic in time" Billy Pilgrim, and Vonnegut's unusual narrative structuring, with the symptoms and experiences of post-traumatic stress disorder. In the course of her essay, Vees-Gulani attempts to synthesise psychiatric theory with literary theory in order to shed new light on Slaughterhouse's haunted protagonist Billy Pilgrim, as well as on his ostensibly traumatised creator, Kurt Vonnegut.
In "Diagnosing Billy Pilgrim: A Psychiatric Approach to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five", Susanne Vees-Gulani proffers a systematic analysis of the exploration of trauma and its manifestation in the novel through the lens of psychiatric theory. In conclusion, I wish to present how Slaughterhouse Five allows a positive paradigm shift in historiography with the historical, literary, and philosophical ideas Kurt Vonnegut presents through postmodern literature. I will discuss Vonnegut’s philosophy of time and how a non-linear view of time plays an important role in the representation of history in present, past and future events.
Vonnegut’s usage and display of time is interwoven with the characteristics of historiographic metafiction. I will discuss how this is used, and to what benefits this form of historiography can adhere to the limitations of writing first-person experiences and events within a war.
After which, I will discuss Vonnegut’s genre of historiography, that being historiographic metafiction. Primarily, I will focus on why and how it occurred, as well as why it was kept out of the media for so long.
This paper is a close reading of Kurt Vonnegut's work of literary fiction entitled Slaughterhouse Five, primarily it's contribution of the genre 'historiographic metafiction' to postmodern historiography, The question I will address is ‘How does Vonnegut contribute to the postmodern historical literature through the usage of historiographic metafiction?’ I will address the question by, firstly, giving a summarized description of the bombing of Dresden, the history of the event, and the historiography behind it.
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