HIGH Quality Research paper Required - 40 Hours (Follow every single Instruction) - Need Original paper
First, see attached for a sample paper “Research Paper_Short”.
It was submitted by a student of mine last semester and is shared with you with his permission. Reviewing it should give you a sense of what you're aiming for with your own work. A couple things to keep in mind as you work:
· The overview of the six articles (references) is the biggest portion of your paper. After setting up your general argument in your intro (which you may not know until you've written the whole thing, so feel free to write that last), proceed one by one through the articles you found. It's best to cover these chronologically. Here you'll want to lead with a succinct, specific statement of the article's argument. Then you'll unpack that argument and (objectively) explain how the critic made his or her case. Avoid quoting from the articles, as that will only take up space and will draw readers' attention away from your explanation. This is the time for careful analysis and explication--what are the premises of the argument, what assumptions (about literature, about interpretation) does the author draw on, what seem to be his or her primary concerns and how do you know? Write about a page for each of your articles.
· In the next section (3 pages or so), assess and evaluate the arguments. It's best to organize this section thematically--what resonances did you see across the arguments; what kinds of conclusions were drawn, which are the strongest and why, which the weakest and why; how and why did folks tend to disagree? Make sure you explain your conclusions when you talk about the solid or weak interpretations you read or whether a conclusion is interesting--be sure you unpack what that means. Still stay away from quoting over-much here. You can assume your reader is familiar with the articles and the novel; just be sure you provide enough context so readers can follow along.
· In the final section (3 pages or so), you'll offer your own interpretation as derived from your engagement with these articles and the novel itself. Don't do any additional research for this portion of your essay. The idea is that after seeing what others have done with the book, weighing and measuring those arguments, and with familiarity of the text itself, you should have drawn your own conclusions about the book--lay them out here.
With all of this, don't forget about foundational writing elements like a strong thesis to unify the paper, coherent paragraphs, engaging style, and proper grammar. Look back over your returned papers to this point for any feedback I've offered on these points.
Research
Paper_Short (1).docx
11
Short
Joseph Short
Marybeth Baggett
ENGL603
6 October 2019
From the Postmodern to the Psychoanalytic: Critical Studies of Slaughterhouse-Five
Kurt Vonnegut’s 1968 novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a relatively recent addition to the literary canon, transitioning from a censored work—subject to the whims of book burners—to must-read fiction in its half century on store shelves. Written in a time when postmodernism and existentialism had found their place in both the classroom and the writer’s studio and when psychiatry had taken its place as a noble or ignoble profession, this novel must be considered in the light of these societal changes. A critical history, then, will include approaches to the novel that explain its techniques and others that examine its purpose in light of them. But these approaches will complement rather than rival one another and serve to illustrate the work’s complexity, not only in form but also in content. Slaughterhouse-Five is not merely an anti-war piece; it is a deeply compelling work that studies human isolation, alienation, and the fragility of the human mind when subjected to repeated and unaddressed traumas. The tragedy of Billy Pilgrim is that he was damaged long before the war the novel ostensibly responds to, and that damage festered like an untreated wound until it destroyed him.
Early criticism refrained from commenting on the protagonist’s mental state but instead emphasized the satirical nature of the novel. A function of satire is to confront society with what causes it discomfort. Attributing the comment to a textbook publisher, former high school teacher Donald Veix bemoans the shallow nature of English curriculum in high schools of his day: “the student never reads about drugs, liquor, love or life” (25). This extended to banning a novel such as Slaughterhouse-Five, ostensibly due to its language and sexual references (26), including the Tralfamadorian statement that male homosexuals were necessary for human reproduction (Vonnegut 118), a notion that would have raised a few eyebrows in its day. This inclusivity, appearing in a single paragraph midway through the novel’s roughly 200 pages, could alone be enough to draw the ire of censors. Blatant references to pornography, a scene near the novel’s end taking place in a “tawdry bookstore” (204), and at least 15 occurrences of the so-called f-word would only confirm their disdain. For Veix, however, these are convenient targets, and the true reason for censorship is the novel’s honest confrontation of a warmongering western society that holds slaughter as sacred as long as its cause seems just (26).
Though his article was written less than a decade after the novel’s initial publication, Veix is already displaying a New Historicist critical viewpoint, treating the novel as a product of its time. The anti-war attitudes of the 1960s are in effect with the United States entrenched in the Vietnam conflict when the novel was published and winding down when the article was published. Vietnam is referenced several times in the novel, with Robert Pilgrim, the protagonist’s son, serving as a Green Beret, decorated for valor and wounded in action (Vonnegut 194). Notions of American moral superiority and the nobility of war are challenged in the novel (Veix 30), and their champions are objects of ridicule who dehumanize anyone who disagrees (Vonnegut 195).
When teaching Slaughterhouse-Five, Veix suggests immersing students in the pro-war culture of American life during the time in which the novel was set. For Veix, this “provid[es] a balanced view” (30), when juxtaposed with the contemporary Vietnam-era anti-war message and could be accomplished through screening films and inviting guest speakers, particularly those who were involved in World War II. This brings to mind an image of the novel’s staunchly pro-war Professor Rumfoord, haranguing students about the justness of the Dresden bombing (30), but perhaps Veix has a more nuanced approach in mind.
The end of the Vietnam Conflict afforded some historical distance to critical considerations of the novel, and some critics began to favor the development of the story itself as a topic worth consideration. One such critic is T.J. Matheson, who opens his 1984 article lamenting on the lack of critical agreement on the very meaning of the novel, particularly its peculiar opening chapter (228-29). Its pages feature none of the main characters, and in a move unusual for a novel, their nature as fictional creations is emphasized (229). Indeed, Matheson draws great attention to the metafictional aspects of Slaughterhouse-Five. Of paramount importance, he says, is the narrator’s attempt to avoid creating another work of escapist literature; had he done so, he would be the literary equivalent of a drug dealer, enabling his readers to avoid painful truths by indulging in action and adventure and glorious war (233). These metafictional elements appear not only in the opening chapters but on two occasions in the main “fictional” section of the work. Twice, the narrator interrupts Billy’s narrative to tell the reader, “That was I. That was me” (Vonnegut 130, 153), identifying himself as one of Billy’s fellow prisoners of war. This does not so much establish the author as a character but rather serves to emphasize an aspect of the fictive process, namely the translation of personal experiences into fictional events.
The New Historicist approach persists in Matheson’s article in the form of brief analyses of Vonnegut’s references to events such as the World’s Fair and companies such as Ford and Disney. To expand on these, Matheson injects a quotation from Henry Ford on the unreliability of history and evaluates Disney’s sanitized view of the subject. To Matheson, both companies are mining history for commercial capital (236). Recognizing this sets the stage for the narrator’s meeting with Mary O’Hare and forces him to question his own motives for writing a book about the war: is he mining the past for profit in the same way these companies are, and do all writers of historical novels do the same? (Matheson 237).
Generally, metafictional considerations have more in common with postmodern interpretations of a text. Matheson, however, avoids terms commonly associated with postmodernism, including the very term “metafiction.” This article, then, symbolizes a shift in the critical paradigm from examining the novel’s form and function to explorations of theme and subtextual meaning. A similar transition is the theme of a 1995 article by Hans van Stralen, though this transition has less to do with evaluation by critics than with two related but distinct philosophical movements that influenced the author’s mindset.
Stralen identifies characteristics of Slaughterhouse-Five which seem to establish it as a postmodern novel and lists a number of articles published in the 1980s that undergird this claim (3). These postmodern characteristics include the absence of traditional narrative elements, such as beginning, middle, and end, the disjointed presentation of the narrative, and the lack of a moral center for the novel (3). However, Stralen believes that those who advance the postmodern interpretation neglect the vital distinction between postmodernism and existentialism (3-4). He argues that those who fail to see this distinction treat postmodernism as the literary equivalent of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism, but this is a mistake because existentialist works fall into two separate camps. One is dominated by the works of Sartre and De Beauvoir, and the worlds their characters inhabit are governed by some form of ethics and a demand that a commitment be made with they are confronted by an either-or dilemma. The second camp, influenced by the works of Camus and Kafka, rejects the notion of moral commitment and accepts the absurdities and inscrutability of life (Stralen 4). In Vonnegut’s novel, protagonist Billy Pilgrim is a cog in the machine—as a chaplain’s assistant, he is not even a proper soldier (Vonnegut 32)—and incapable of affecting the war in any meaningful way. This sense of powerlessness is reiterated by the Tralfamadorian philosophy that every moment in time is scripted and the players pre-ordained, like “bugs trapped in amber…trapped in the amber of this moment” (87). This exemplar philosophy of Slaughterhouse-Five is, according to Stralen, antithetical to Sartre’s ethical imperative and disqualifies the novel as a purely postmodern work (Stralen 5-6).
Stralen’s objections do not seem to have been heeded, however, as later critics have responded more favorably to the meaninglessness envisioned by the text and concluded that Slaughterhouse-Five is “a work of deep moral significance” (Coleman 642). To Martin Coleman, writing in 2008, the novel demonstrates a way for the individual to transcend tragedy and “live honestly and meaningfully” (642). Coleman is able to draw this conclusion because he searches for internal meaning. Of the protagonist’s supposed jaunts through space and time, Coleman writes, “Billy Pilgrim’s experiences are not wrong or untrue, because the things experienced really are what they are experienced as—that is, frightening, disorienting, unpredictable, discontinuous” (685). Billy can and does find personal meaning in his “so it goes” attitude developed under the supposed tutelage of the Tralfamadorians. Whether that meaning is based on events as they really occurred is immaterial (Coleman 688).
This examination of Billy’s internal life as the source of meaning is rooted firmly in psychoanalytic critical theory, which sees a character’s present mental and emotional state as growing from his past. Yet Billy remains unaware of how deeply the past has damaged him and is unable to connect these events to their present effects (Coleman 688). Back home, years after the war, and despite achieving financial and professional success, Billy would cry “for no apparent reason” (Vonnegut 64). Because he does not understand how his present pain is directly related to his past experiences—because that connection eludes him—time loses meaning. In a real sense, time becomes an enemy; first, he tries to escape it by convincing himself he can travel through it, and then he begins to deny its effects on him or anyone else (Coleman 688-91). This is most evident in a passage Coleman quotes from the novel wherein the alien Tralfamadorians, due to their ability to see all moments in time simultaneously, say of corpses that they are “in a bad condition in that particular moment but…just fine in plenty of other moments” (qtd. in Coleman 691). Thus, everyone who died in the war and after, from Wild Bob to Roland Weary, from the tens of thousands who died in Dresden, to Billy’s own unloved wife Valencia, is still alive if he can just “travel to” or envision the right moment.
This psychoanalytic critique of Billy Pilgrim and Slaughterhouse-Five continued from the 2000s to the early years of this decade. Kevin Brown introduces his 2011 article, “The Psychiatrists Were Right: Anomic Alienation in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five,” with an examination of an article by Susanne Vees-Gulani. She, according to Brown, views Billy as a sufferer of PTSD who was failed by the inadequate psychiatric system of his day (Brown 101). Brown agrees but insists she misses the mark in one respect: that Billy’s problems extend further back to long before his wartime experiences (101). Billy’s earliest recorded childhood experience is a traumatic one, his father tossing him into a YMCA pool to fend for himself in a bid to “teach” the boy to swim. While Vonnegut himself seems to mock the psychiatrists, who focus on this experience to the exclusion of Billy’s wartime trauma, Brown urges readers against making the opposite mistake (102). The psychiatrists referenced in the title of this article are not those of the real world, but rather those of the novel who attributed Billy’s problems to patterns of trauma begun in his early childhood. In a sense, they were right to do so. It is not the individual experience of being thrown into the pool that harmed him to such an extreme, but rather what it represents—a lack of real love or connection with his parents or anyone else in his formative years. This stunted Billy’s emotional growth and prevented him from forming positive relationships later in life or even caring about his own survival (103-104). This remains true even when partnered with a wife who demonstrably loves and tries to understand him. All Billy can do is fake the part of a dutiful husband while reflecting disdainfully on his wife’s appearance and how much he didn’t want to marry her (103-104). The PTSD triggered by the war is exacerbated by this existing condition, which prevents him from forming relationships necessary for its successful treatment. Billy’s only means of coping is to retreat into a fantasy world he has fooled himself into thinking is real, populated by characters he can control (105-106).
The study of Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five continues to the present day and extends throughout the world. Though it began as a subversive novel, censored by school boards and in at least one case becoming the target of a book burning (Veix 27), it is by now the subject of academic papers, such as a dissertation published as recently as May of this year (2019) by a student in the Shanghai International Studies University in Shanghai, China. This dissertation by Jing Shi employs a number of literary critical techniques and, in this capacity, serves as a fitting capstone to the present study.
Shi employs a form of author-centric criticism by examining Vonnegut’s life and background and suggesting that events within his wartime experiences may form an autobiographical basis for the story (553). Shi then revisits ground previously trodden by earlier critics, namely Vonnegut’s use of postmodern techniques, including metafiction and non-linear structure (554). Returning to the author as source of the text, Shi speculates that Vonnegut employed non-linearity because of “his mental traumas caused by the Dresden Bombing” (555). For Shi, Slaughterhouse-Five is an intensely autobiographical novel, and Billy Pilgrim is an embodiment of the author’s need to express his pain. Shi’s dissertation is the least refined of the articles examined. It reads more as a research paper than an attempt to say anything new about Vonnegut’s work. Yet this serves to illustrate the progress of the novel through the decades; much as its subject matter—psychological trauma, the myths of American infallibility, the notion that all’s fair in war—it has gone from a book that must be burned to a profoundly influential work that is burned into the minds of those who read it.
Synthesizing the critical approaches scholars have taken toward Slaughterhouse-Five is a fairly straightforward task. Typically, Vonnegut is viewed as a postmodern writer, and even those who seek to refine that label to something like existentialist admit to the postmodern trappings of the work (Stralen 4). Postmodern techniques recognized by the authors of these articles include nonlinear narrative, collage, parodies (Shi 554, 556, 559), and satire (Matheson 228). Two of the critics examined, Shi and Stralen, identify the novel as essentially postmodern, while a third, Matheson, avoids using the term. However, the themes he explores in relation to Vonnegut’s work thoroughly belong to that school of thought. A fourth writer, Viex, who penned the earliest article examined herein, focuses on the satirical nature of the piece as a reason that censors targeted the book in his day. The only two writers who stay away from any postmodern interpretation of the novel entirely (Brown and Coleman) have a separate but noncontradictory purpose in mind: a psychoanalytic examination of the text. Shi also verges on the psychoanalytic at one point by speculating on the author’s mindset when writing the novel and his motives for doing so (555).
A point of contention among scholars is how closely Vonnegut should be associated with his persona in the novel. Shi’s purporting to analyze the author’s own mind places her in the camp that sees the narrator in chapters one and ten as a direct analogue to Vonnegut (Shi 556). While acknowledging the lack of agreement among critics as to whether the narrator is Vonnegut or a pastiche of himself carefully crafted to set up the story, Matheson favors the latter interpretation (230). However, his reasoning for doing so seems questionable at best, treating the narrator’s self-effacement on the quality of his novel as a straightforward statement—if he says the novel is “lousy,” he must be telling the truth, and “he would surely not publish it in a form he found unsatisfactory” (Matheson 230). A further proof Matheson raises is the narrator’s reference to himself as “an old fart” (Vonnegut 4, 9) being at odds with the author’s actual age—46—at the time of publication. Matheson insists that 46 cannot be considered old (230-31). This is by no means compelling evidence, as nonspecific terms such as “old fart” can be highly subjective, and the narrator has Billy muse, “‘Where have all the years gone?’” when he is aged 44 (Vonnegut 59). Shi provides a counter to Matheson’s arguments by stating that, “all the clear publicly-available content that the author revealed to readers aims at exposing his identity as the author” (556). Coleman likely agrees, characterizing Slaughterhouse-Five as autobiographical (682).
Both critical approaches employed by these articles are valid. The postmodern approach examines the form the novel takes and the literary devices the author uses to develop the story, while the psychoanalytic approach explores the possible motivations for using that form. Of the four articles that posit a postmodern interpretation, Stralen’s is the most intriguing since its methodology is the most specific. By dividing postmodern works into additional categories and differentiating those inspired by Sartre and De Beauvoir from those inspired by Camus and Kafka (Stralen 3-4), he establishes the moral tone of the novel and circumvents what Vonnegut tries to avoid—the glorifying of war. A work written in the vein of Sartre might well demand its protagonist take a stand, casting Billy Pilgrim as John Wayne in direct defiance of the wishes of the novel’s Mary O’Hare: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies, and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra and John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful…” (Vonnegut 16). By establishing Vonnegut in the tradition of Camus instead, Stralen presents the novel’s moral outlook as bleak and its lead’s overriding character trait the acceptance of his powerlessness and ultimately inability to change circumstances. While a character played by John Wayne might attempt to save his fellow soldiers, Billy Pilgrim merely shrugs and repeats as a refrain the Tralfamadorians’ lackadaisical response to death, “So it goes” (Vonnegut 29).
Not all critics accept this characterization of Vonnegut as a “conscienceless escapist” (Tilton qtd. in Coleman 682). Martin Coleman recognizes a positive moral quality in the novel, interpreting it as a philosophical work with a goal of “making sense of experience rather than discovering ultimate reality” (683-84). Coleman employs a psychoanalytic approach to Vonnegut’s work, though he and fellow critic Kevin Brown differ in the subject of their examination. In labeling Slaughterhouse-Five an autobiographical novel (681, 682), Coleman attempts to probe the psyche of the author. Brown, on the other hand, treats protagonist Billy Pilgrim as the patient on the proverbial psychiatric couch. He is even careful to differentiate between Vonnegut the author and Vonnegut the character in the novel, referring to the latter as “the Vonnegut of the introduction” (Brown 107). As critics are divided on how self-referential the novel is, Brown’s seems the safer approach. It is also the more thorough. In tracking Billy’s development from childhood to the novel’s present day, Brown gives a full account of the repeated traumas that formed in him the mental construct of Tralfamadore and refrains from wholly attributing his mental problems to the war. In effect, Brown avoids the opposite mistake that Billy’s psychiatrists make when they eliminate the war as a contributing factor (102). Tracing Billy’s psychosis to his inability to form human connections elevates Slaughterhouse-Five from a mere anti-war diatribe to an examination of the deleterious effects of solitude in the midst of a crowd.
Despite the by-and-large agreement of critics, Slaughterhouse-Five is no easy text to interpret. Merely tracing the plotline is troublesome since events are presented out of order. Even the first chapter, written in the voice of a possibly fictionalized version of Vonnegut, is chaotic, introducing readers to the same character, “an old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare,” twice in the first six pages (3, 6), almost as if the narrator forgot he introduced him the first time. The same meandering from event to event, careless of the years that pass in between or their chronological placement is reflected in both the first chapter and the story proper, though it is far more noticeable in the main story. Including this narrative disconnect in the first chapter does serve to prepare the reader for Billy’s wandering mind and offers a clue that his supposed time travel can easily be replicated by thoughtful reflection on the past.
The storyline is simple: Billy, a young chaplain’s assistant is captured behind enemy lines during World War II and becomes a prisoner of war. He is transported to a prisoner of war camp and then put to forced labor in the city of Dresden, where he is present for the Allied bombing that destroys the city. Following the war, he briefly stays in a mental hospital before finishing his optometry degree, marrying a woman he does not love and rising to prominence as a prosperous civic leader. Years later, he is the sole survivor of a plane crash, wherein he fractures his skull. His grief-stricken wife dies on her way to visit him in the hospital. Billy then begins writing letters to the newspaper and goes on the radio claiming he can travel through time and has been abducted by aliens. Ignoring his daughter’s pleas to stop, he plans to continue spreading his message.
The average reader may scoff at the notion of time travel or alien abduction, but must this be the automatic response? By framing Billy’s story as a fictional account, Vonnegut exempts the reader from having to ask whether such fantastical occurrences are possible. Billy Pilgrim and most of the characters that inhabit chapters two through nine are inventions of the narrator. By creating his own world, he allows for the possibility that time travel and Tralfamadorians exist within its confines. The astute reader of this novel-within-a-novel may even spot a medical reason for Billy’s condition: it could be inherited. A quarter of the way through the novel, Billy flashes forward to a time when he visits his aged mother in a nursing home and the following description is given: “…she gathered energy from all over her ruined body… At last she had accumulated enough to whisper this complete sentence: ‘How did I get so old?’” (Vonnegut 47). On the surface, this seems little more than an aged woman confronting her own mortality. Then, several trips and a mere twelve pages later, a slightly younger Billy asks himself, “‘Where have all the years gone?’” (60). The similarity of these reactions begs the question of whether Billy and his mother might not share a similar genetic condition that causes both to mentally travel through time. Another clue pointing to the genuineness of Billy’s story is that other characters stumble upon him seemingly entranced while on one of his trips. This first occurs when Billy travels from World War II to a New Year’s Eve Party in 1961 to find himself drunkenly cheating on his wife. Billy is shaken awake by a fellow soldier during the war, still feeling the effects of the alcohol and upset over something that occurred in the future (48-50). This seems significant because there is no reference to Billy consuming alcohol during the wartime scenes and no reasonable explanation for why he is thinking about events that had yet to happen.
This does not prove the authenticity of Billy’s testimony about time travel. Equally plausible, if not more so, is that the entire narrative of chapters two through nine is seen through the lens of a Billy who has already survived the plane crash. His fractured skull may have been accompanied by a traumatic brain injury that is distorting his memory. Vonnegut seems to allow this when relating the injury: “Billy had a fractured skull, but he was still conscious. He didn’t know where he was. His lips were working, and he whispered to [the golliwog] his address: ‘Schlachthof-fünf’” (Vonnegut 160). His lips moving without Billy knowing where he is may be a statement about his entire story: he is speaking without understanding. This is how Billy’s daughter interprets his behavior. According to her, Billy “never mentioned any of this before the airplane crash” (32). The “any of this” refers to his supposed time travel and abduction by aliens from Tralfamadore. In fact, every major element of Billy’s fantastical story can be traced to one scene in the novel, which occurs during his trip to New York following his post-crash hospitalization. In Times Square, Billy spots four paperback science fiction novels written by his friend Kilgore Trout in the display window of an adult bookstore. Going inside, he peruses two of the novels. The first depicts a man and woman abducted by aliens and placed in their zoo; the second is an account of a man who builds a time machine (205-207). These novels correspond to Billy’s supposed experiences with the Tralfamadorian zoo and to spending most of his life as a time traveler. While paying for one of the novels, Billy catches sight of a pornographic magazine which purports to contain pictures of a missing Hollywood actress, Montana Wildhack. Billy folds Montana into his delusion as well, casting her as the woman imprisoned with him in the alien zoo (208-09). The fact that she is missing adds to his story: he can tell himself that she is, “back on Tralfamadore, taking care of [their] baby” (209).
Just as the bookstore scene is key for understanding the novel’s storyline, another scene is vital for understanding its theme. While recovering from the plane crash, Billy shares a hospital room with a Professor Rumfoord, described as “a retired brigadier general in the Air Force Reserve, the official Air Force Historian, a full professor, the author of twenty-six books, a multimillionaire since birth, and one of the greatest competitive sailors of all time” (Vonnegut 189). Dismissing the comatose Billy as non-human (195), Rumfoord—who never visited Dresden—begins to talk of the necessity of bombing it. When Billy awakes and says he was there, Rumfoord at first does not believe him (197) and later discounts his opinion (202-203), preferring to rely on the facts and figures reported in official sources (191). Even when allowing for the possibility that Billy was present, Rumfoord insists that the Allies were right to bomb Dresden (203).
The rich, intellectual general finds his equal and opposite in Mary O’Hare, the registered nurse and mother from chapter one. Mary is as naïve as he is cold and heartless, but neither fully understands war, having (presumably on the professor’s part) never fought in one. Rumfoord is a reservist and a general; he may have commanded men, but he views battles as a set of numbers and strategic decisions. Of Dresden, he says, “‘It had to be done’” (Vonnegut 203). Mary, on the other hand, is enraged by the very concept of war. She thinks of her daughters and is horrified by the notion of anyone’s children dying in something as terrible as a war (17). Both Billy and the narrator placate their detractors, the former assuring Rumfoord he understands the necessity of the bombing and the narrator promising Mary not to glorify war when he writes his book (203, 17). Neither man makes an effort to explain his view of war because both were damaged by it and find talking about it difficult. The narrator tells Mary he has already wasted 5,000 pages trying to write about Dresden and doubts he will ever finish (17). One further parallel exists between Rumfoord and Mary—their ability to unintentionally inspire. It is Rumfoord’s partial display of sympathy that coincides with what may be chronologically Billy’s first expression of his so-it-goes philosophy: “Everything is all right, and everybody has to do exactly what he does. I learned that on Tralfamadore” (203). And it is Mary’s quick reversal of temperament when the narrator wilts under her unprovoked anger that gives him his subtitle (17) and the impetus he needs to finish his “lousy little book” (4).
Whether taking a postmodern or psychoanalytic approach to Slaughterhouse-Five, the critic is confronted with a literary complexity that belies its simple language. This simplicity is highlighted by the author himself when he points out that the main narrative ends with the onomatopoeia of a bird chirping (Vonnegut 23). This is analogous to the human mind, which is both subject to a cacophony of complex and often contradictory thoughts but often expresses itself in language that is surprisingly simple. The brain knows when the body needs to refuel and balances this against the person’s preferences for taste and memories of how his stomach has previously reacted to certain foods; yet this can all be summed up in the words, “I am hungry.” Billy Pilgrim has many thoughts about the war and philosophy, but he cannot find the words to express them until a traumatic brain injury forces him to concoct fantasies about time travel, aliens, and a so-it-goes view of life and death. As Billy tells his daughter, those views needed time to ripen (30). This critical history has examined Vonnegut’s novel in terms of form (a postmodern structure utilizing satire, parody, and nonlinear storytelling) and function (to illustrate a man’s struggle to cope with repeated traumas exacerbated by his wartime experiences) and concluded that the novel is much more than an anti-war piece. As the narrator reminds his readers, if war ended, people would still die (4). Billy Pilgrim has repeatedly cheated death, but even he will die. To cope, he tries to convince himself that death means very little and that even after he dies, he will live on in all the individual preceding moments of his life. He has to convince himself of this because, despite his complex attempts to convince himself otherwise, Billy Pilgrim is—simply put and like so many others—terrified of death.
Works Cited
Coleman, Martin. “The Meaninglessness of Coming Unstuck in Time.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, vol. 44, no. 4, 2008, pp. 681–698. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40321290.
Matheson, T. J. “‘This Lousy Little Book’: The Genesis and Development of ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ As Revealed in Chapter One.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 16, no. 2, 1984, pp. 228–240. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/29532276.
Shi, Jing. "On the Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Slaughterhouse-Five." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 9.5 (2019): 553-61. ProQuest. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
Stralen, Hans van. "‘Slaughterhouse Five", Existentialist Themes Elaborated in a Postmodernist Way." Neophilologus 79.1 (1995): 3-12. ProQuest. Web. 22 Sep. 2019.
Veix, Donald B. “Teaching a Censored Novel: Slaughterhouse Five.” The English Journal, vol. 64, no. 7, 1975, pp. 25–33. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/815302.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. 1968. Reprint. Modern Library, 2019. Digital.