earticle

영어

This paper aims to examine postmodern narrative and rewriting history through analyzing Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five. The novel subverts and deconstructs the concept of historical good by using multi-leveled, fragmentary, and repetitive narrative structure. Thus, Vonnegut’s narrative invites us to be aware of fictionality of historical past self-consciously. It is true that when past events are selected and written in history or fiction it is arranged in a chronological order with causality and continuity. However, Vonnegut rejects the narrative unity of traditional novel by using deliberate temporal and spacial movement in the several layers of narrative. We can know that meta-fictional perspective can also be detected by three separate narratives from different periods such as Billy’s narrative, Vonnegut’s narrative and Tralfamadorian Narrative. This suggests the fact that we can regard the novel as a creative specimen of the postmodern historiographical metafiction, Vonnegut tries to rewrite war history of Dresden Bombing fire from the perspective of common man, Billy. In the end, this study shows that Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse- Five is worthy of praising as a proof of Linda Hutcheon’s historiographic metafiction.