A time-travel through history and war : representing trauma in Kurt Vonnegut’s slaughterhouse-five

• Main Author: Tan, Klara Hui Wen
• Other Authors: Richard Alan Barlow
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2015
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::American
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/62766
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

“You were just babies in the war—like the ones upstairs!” (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five 18). A statement which drives home questions of the ethical foundations of war, Mary O’Hare’s poignant outburst is perhaps one of the most memorable lines in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1965). Vonnegut’s satirical novel is renowned not only for its anti-war sentiments, but also its thought-provoking insight on the human condition. In his autobiography A Man without a Country (2005), Vonnegut directly strips away the glory associated with war, terming it “pure nonsense, pointless destruction” (17). The destruction of war as Vonnegut’s novel illustrate, does not only extend to the physical landscape, but to the way innocent lives are destroyed in their positions as pawns amidst a power struggle. Survivors are thus left in a gaping silence as they try to comprehend the senseless violence witnessed, and articulate their traumatic experience in wake of the war. Hence, I would like to extend Shoshana Felman’s concept of ‘testimony’ and examine Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five as a witness’s attempt to articulate the horrific Dresden massacre. More specifically, I will suggest that the novel can be read as “an endeavour of creating and recreating an address for a historical experience which annihilated the very possibility of address” (Felman 41). This essay will unravel the significance of time-travel as a tool used in representing Vonnegut’s traumatic war experience in Dresden. The temporal disruption observed in the structure of the novel will also be discussed as a manifestation of trauma and as an indication towards the futility of mental repression. Through the discussion of time-travel, Slaughterhouse Five will be examined as a novel that forces readers to reconsider our conventional expectations of the world, the nature of language in the representation of trauma, war literature as a genre, and the ability for one to move on from the past.