Unstuck in Time: Metafiction, Fragmentation, Absurdity, and the Collapse of Grand Narratives in Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) keeps informing its readers that it cannot do the one thing it was written to do: describe the destruction of Dresden. This article takes that admission seriously. Reading the novel alongside Jean-François Lyotard's account of the postmodern condition as "incredulity toward metanarratives" (xxiv), I argue that Vonnegut's metafictional intrusions, his scrambled chronology, and his flat comic refrain are not stylistic flourishes layered over a war story, but the only honest response available to a writer confronting an event that resists the shape conventional narrative wants to give it. Drawing on Linda Hutcheon's historiographic metafiction, Patricia Waugh's theory of self-conscious fiction, Cathy Caruth's work on trauma and narrative, and Albert Camus's philosophy of the absurd, the article traces how the novel's form, not just its content, dismantles the grand narratives of heroism, historical progress, and rational agency that ordinarily organise stories about war. Particular attention goes to the novel's autobiographical first chapter, its treatment of Tralfamadorian time, the recurring line "So it goes," and its ironic use of real wartime documents.