ABSTRACT
Facing the silent challenge at the center of all his work so far, Kurt Vonnegut had to embark on a new way of writing, factual and fantastic, dislocating and displacing reportage toward the functions and possibilities of the imagination, which might speak in the necessary silence, make pathetic, console. As for reading a Tralfamadorian novel all at once, that may be possible for the little plumbers’ helpers from outer space, but an Earthling – limited by language to reading one sentence and turning one page at a time – can hardly take in all Slaughterhouse-Five in one glance. Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about the author challenging his own processes and bringing himself into the center of his fictional activity. Not surprisingly, this release of the authorial ego became the developing concern of his next works, where the relation of the novelist to his stories, characters and aspirations for the imagination continue as a theme.
