Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" as Historiographic Metafiction

Markus Schneider

• Publisher: GRIN Verlag
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9783640201341
• Edition: 0
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

Seminar paper from the year 2008 in the subject American Studies - Literature, grade: 2, 3, University of Bamberg (Professur für Amerikanistik), course: American Historiographic Metafiction, language: English, abstract: The representation of history depends mainly on the perspective, attitude andcultural background of the beholder; which at the same time marks the major flaw ofhistoriography. One topic or event will never be identically described by two historians, even if they are given the very same materials and sources to work with. As a consequence, historiography can only try to create an image, as true and original as possible, but is neverable to depict everything that happened as it actually was in its full scope. So there wereand always will be fictional elements and interpretations in the reports and writings aboutpast events.This assumption leads us to historiographic metafiction, a style of writing thatemerged during the postmodern era. If there is fiction in scholarly historiography, where isthe difference between that and a novel that deals with history? This term paper will try togive an answer to that question and examine features and characteristics of historiographicmetafiction, which eventually will be applied to Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. Inpostmodern literature and, of course, especially in historiographic metafiction, authorstried to find new ways of telling stories and particularly representing history. I will take acloser look at the narrative frame and especially the concept of time Vonnegut used in thenovel. But how is history represented in Slaughterhouse-Five? This will be the second partof the analysis that will attempt to find answers why Vonnegut wrote the novel the way hedid. The third part will deal with intertextual elements in the novel. All citations from thenovel and the pages indicated in brackets are taken from the edition cited below.