Poetics of Postmodernism in Kurt Vonnegut’s The Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

This article is a postmodern critique of Kurt Vonnegut's The Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Literary experimentation and the historical aspects are the basic aspects of postmodernism which are the focus of this article. This article is a fictional critique of literary exhaustion. The characters, stage settings, and the narrator depict the modern literary mode. The article uses Brenda Marshall, Linda Hutcheon and Gerard Genette's narrative theory and historical metafiction to examine the historical aspects of the novel. It also depicts the miseries and sufferings of the people who were eyewitnesses of the Second World War. The article concentrates and examines Vonnegut's actualization of the postmodernist theory in writing "an anti-war book" which is based on his subjective experiences of war as a prisoner. Vonnegut unveils the atrocities committed on people and thus shows how Western nations mask their real intentions in launching wars and justify their brutal acts.