Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance With Death is a 1969 novel by best-selling author Kurt Vonnegut. His most popular work and widely regarded as a classic, it combines science fiction elements with an analysis of the human condition from an uncommon perspective, using time travel as a plot device and the bombing of Dresden in World War II, which Vonnegut witnessed, as a starting point.

Literary Techniques

Two techniques Vonnegut pioneered were the use of choruses and the plant-connect analogies.

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The first was later used by the author Chuck Palahniuk in all of his minimalist style novels. Vonnegut used the "So it goes" chorus as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief.

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The plant connect is probably best explained with his description of a Russian's face in the prisoner's camp, and his father's watch in the dark. He uses the word "radial" to describe them both, implying a connection of some sort. The connection is of course that the Russian's face reminded him that the other people in the camp were human and that moment is thus filled with hope for him. So was his father's watch, a bastion of security and familiarity in an unfamiliar place. This is also used in a description of a gun and Billy's penis. Palahniuk offers us a suitable quote on this. "...because beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power."

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Vonnegut also makes extensive use of metafiction devices. The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but about how Vonnegut came to write Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologises for the fact that the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre". In a similar way to Mother Night, but much more extensively, Vonnegut plays with ideas of fiction and reality. The opening chapter's very first sentence claims that "All this happened, more or less" and during Billy Pilgrim's war experiences Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

Related Topics:
Metafiction - Mother Night

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