everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. “it is so short and jumbled and jangled, sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Well, he says why he writes this book the way he does, and if we see him as himself, and not as a metaphor or representation of himself, we have to take him at his word: Why would he do this? (aka, 'how do the narrative components function to destabilize the landscape of the novel?’ … ) as if nonfiction does not a create a story about how we should understand a thing (a "fact,” sure). (i argue that) vonnegut puts himself in the first chapter in order to undo his work as fiction and, further, to undo “fiction” as a safe place for things that are too terrible to be “real." vonnegut, a fictive-real person (like me) places himself in the first chapter and demands that we (yes, i said we because, though it has gone out of fashion, if you are reading, you have joined vonnegut and me, and i think this deserves an acknowledgement and a plural) abandon the idea that fiction and nonfiction are things that somehow mutually exclude each other, as if fiction cannot give fact. (did you catch that last tricksy, literary critic’s maneuver–to use active verbs that, you guessed it!, distract you from asking who is this person making these claims? what kinds of investments are behind the things i say to you? what kinds of power structures are upholding my ability to write to you, dear reader, as i am?) so it goes.” 21-22)Ī poststucturalist reading of slaughterhouse five, and even debating the validity of this sort of reading, obscures the work vonnegut accomplishes in his novel. but she did look back, and I love her for that, because it was so human. the world was better off without them.Īnd lot’s wife, of course, was told not to look back where all those people and their homes had been. “those were vile people in both those cities, as is well known. he has promised that he won’t make a book that encourages wars he won’t narrate his war by forcing the particularity of his own experience into a fictional and linear narrative that thereby pretends that vonnegut had no specific part in this war, that this war has somehow ended, that it had some kind of reason, that it was a terrible thing but oh so worthwhile.Īs vonnegut says, in chapter one, after he paraphrases the biblical destruction of sodom and gomorrah: it is wrong to erase vonnegut, to see his “i” as just the performance of an unstable role, because vonnegut has made a promise. there is such a thing as universality–the wrong thing to do. and when i do this, i “is” just erasing vonnegut from his own frame, which is-not erasing vonnegut this time, but hiding myself within a presumption that i am 1. i just coded it in the sneaky, erasing movement of that “is." i just said "is” as though i was stating a fact about something that is observably true. i just said “is” as though it didn’t matter that someone named kurt vonnegut wrote this particular experience in the way he decided to write it. i knew you could do it!’ well, no, actually i didn’t. ('ah, good, you’ve dropped the intentional nonsense. In particular, vonnegut’s “i” is creating a frame narrative in order to bring attention to the way after-the-fact narratives seem to lose their frames. (‘aaaargh! intentional fallacy!! you can’t know what the author intends.' especially if the there-is-no-author is something that cannot be referred to as the subject.) objections range from the idea that there is no author to the idea that there is no text both are roles within structures of power.īut, kurt vonnegut puts himself in the first chapter of slaughterhouse five because he intends to create a contrast, but not a division, between the frame narrative and the story. isn’t there a whole bunch of structuralist and poststructuralist theory working against this idea? why, yes. the unreliable “i” in slaughterhouse five is kurt vonnegut.
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