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Sandhya Adhikari

Amrit Joshi

ENGL 577.1

14 December 2023

Narrative time-bending to demonstrate the atrocity of history in

“Slaughterhouse Five”

This analytical study focuses on the careful use of time-bending as a narrative technique

to highlight the atrocity of history in the novel “Slaughterhouse Five”. Jweid in his paper, “Time

Travel as a tool of Satiric Dystopia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five” examines science

fiction mainly focusing on dystopia as created by social defects. He attempts to unravel the

reasons behind the presence of political corrupt practices that lead the society to the verge of

dystopian retardation. According to Jweid, “time travel will be interpreted as an authorial

function that exposes the political corruption and military race. Furthermore, it will be identified

as the authentic embodiment of the influence of politics upon people’ lives.” Loeb in her article,

“Vonnegut’s Duty Dance with Death - Theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five” identifies

the time-bending narrative as constantly appearing themes such as war, cruelty, death, innocence,

survival and others. Loeb says, “Vonnegut’s treatment of time is demonstrated to be a process of

spatialization. Thematically, the protagonist comes ‘unstuck’ in time, thus succeeding in

confronting an absurd world and finally transcending death.” “On the Postmodern Narrative

Techniques in Slaughterhouse-Five”, is a paper by Shi emphasis on unique narrative approaches,

various expressive methods and dramatic artistic effects to depict the atrocity that history has

played. In the words of Shi, “the novel applies three distinctive approaches-nonlinear narrative,
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collage and parody in order to deepen the anti-war theme, and then to expose war’s evilness and

absurdity further.”

The novel ‘Slaughterhouse Five’ has a non-linear narrative, the events occurred out of

order to show the evil of history. The history of Dresden has much to do with the bending of time

in the novel. The city of Dresden is described as a beautiful city untouched by wartime privation.

Billy and other American POW are treated to feast. Here, prisoners work for their keep at various

labors, including the manufacture of nutritional malt syrup. Their camp occupies former

slaughterhouse. One night, allied forces carpet bomb the city, then drop incendiary bombs to

create a firestorm that sucks most of the oxygen into the blaze, asphyxiating or incinerating

roughly 130,000 people. This sequence of the atrocity of history has been blended with the time-

bending by Vonnegut. Vonnegut, himself was the survivor of the bombardment in Dresden. He

let his readers visit the painful even of the history through non-linear narrative. Author knew that

the chaos created by the bombardment during the First World War is more than the talk people

do in the coffee /houses. He wanted his reader to revisit the war, specifically bombing of

Dresden through time-bending and non-linear narrative. The central character Billy travels back

in time to demonstrate the Dresden bombing. He is unstuck in time because history itself seems

to be unstuck. The pain and fear of the war has always moved people from one time to another or

let’s say people wish to move from one place to another. The escapism is so urgent but people

are helpless. There was no way out just to move randomly without knowing destination.

Vonnegut more or less tries to come up with the same idea of random visit to nowhere. Billy

lands randomly in a fragmented form in the time during the war and he didn’t want to be there

but he is destined to. The same was the situation of the victims during the war. Both the allies
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and axis had common civilians who became the scapegoat of the war. The time-bending

narratives travels random unable to choose where he will go next because of the trouble of war.

The time-bending technique Vonnegut uses to present the historical atrocity of war has

more to do with the Tralfamadorian concept of story-telling. There is no beginning, middle or

end. Telling the story through this pattern has made the author to dive his readers deep into the

war zone, into the bombing as there is everything absurd. The war zone too has no beginning,

middle or end. Vonnegut is trying to make his reader to be more relatable to his words in the

novel. The end comes before the beginning in the book. Thus, there is no suspense. Actually

there is no suspense in the war too. Dresden as described earlier was a beautiful city far from the

madding war, untouched by missileries and bombs. But, then the suspense broke and Dresden

was broken too. The point of attack is here in the time-bending that Vonnegut applies. Noting is

suspenseful in the war. Everything is open; the bombardment, pain, fear, chaos, death,

vulnerability and what not. This highlightment is possible through the non-linear time pattern

disclosing ending, disclosing suspense. If the effect comes before cause there is no cause and

effect. History has prescribed several causes of the war and it is logical too. But again, what

about humanity and what about the catastrophic events which can never ever compensate the

loss? Vonnegut clearly wanted to justify the idea that there were/are no causes of war at any

level. How can one justify the war with the causes or reasons? War is just a disaster. History has

got the proof that causes are of not issue but the effects has got long lasting impact. Vonnegut

writes, “Because there is nothing intelligent to say about the massacre.” ‘Salughterhouse Five’ is

challenging the concept of cause and effect relationships through the time-bending narrative. The

novel has been convincing in denoting the meaning of effect, of no suspense and no proper
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beginning, middle and end through fragmented time in order to determine how history of war

looks like if we empathize from the nearer viewpoint.

The novel has presented the traumatic effect of the World War II through time-bending

also because the author himself struggles to write the very novel because of trauma. The trauma

was so high that in between the chapters, Vonnegut tells Billy’s story with occasional

interruptions such as “I was there,” that link his war experiences to Billy. Vonnegut’s narrative

time is so strong and his experience so similar to Billy’s that he serves as a secondary protagonist

himself. The trauma that Vonnegut highlights is both external and internal injuries of the war.

Author tries to make sense of trauma through time-bending as he could be far away from the

Dresden’s bombing. Through the time-bending narrative Billy and Vonnegut both presents and

escapes the atrocity of history. They are both trying to make sense of the trauma- specifically the

devastating firebombing of Dresden- that they witnessed as POW during the World War II.

Visiting this historical time and by Billy is the way of showing the brutality of war. Not only re-

visiting the history but in term of other incident too, Vonnegut has presented the inescapable

trauma of the history. Interestingly, the plane crash and the death of his wife echo his

experiences in Dresden. With the plane crash, as in Dresden, Billy is a lucky survivor of an event

that killed almost everyone else. His wife, Valencia, dies of accidental carbon monoxide

poisoning after losing her exhaust pipe in a fender-bender .on the highway. In this way, her death

recalls the deaths of many in Dresden, who died in their shallow basement shelters from carbon

monoxide poisoning. The fact that these later traumas resonate with Dresden bombing points

back to the bombing as the primary trauma of the outrage of history that Vonnegut present in

terms of time-bending. It also indicates, perhaps his idea of time and time travel was developed
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as a coping mechanism for the trauma of the Dresden bombing, which the subsequent traumas

may have triggered.

Thus, we can say that problematizing the Newtonian concept of chronometric time and

presenting the idea of fourth dimension, author wanted to display that the identity of history is

nothing more than a crap that comes back and forth in period of time in the human life, or;

perhaps human themselves goes back and forth to cope with traumatic history. Vonnegut’s

attempt to come to terms with the trauma of an atrocious fire-bombing that cannot be contained

within the bounds of a conventional narrative.

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WORKS CITED

Jweid, Abdalhadi, Nimer, Abu. Time Travel as a Tool of Satiric Dystopia in Kurt Vonnegut’s

Slaughterhouse-Five. Universiti Putra Malaysia, vol.7, 2020.

Loeb, Monica. Vonnegut’s Duty-dance with Death-theme and Structure in Slaughterhouse-Five.

University of Umea, 1979, pp 21-40.

Shi, Jing. On the Postmodern Narrative Techniques in Slaughterhouse-Five. Theory and Practice

in Language Studies, Shanghai International Studies University, vol.9, no.5, 2019, pp

553-561.