Slaughterhouse-Five as Catharsis: How Vonnegut comes to terms with World War II, Vietnam, and the General Ominousness of the Atomic Age Open Access
Weiner, Jacob Samuel (2012)
Published
Abstract
This text explores how the Vietnam War era affected representations of World War II in literature, with a focus on the Kurt Vonnegut novel Slaughterhouse-Five. That novel, which is the story of the gratuitous Allied attack on a nonmilitary city, challenges the common conception that World War II is a "good war" by directly comparing it to the decidedly unpopular Vietnam War and by rendering Hemingwayan glamorizations of combat as absurd and barbaric. Since the Second World War was deemed a necessary war, those who fought in it often had to suppress their wartime traumas because they were expected to uphold the war's image as "good" and the veterans' reputation as "heroic." However, the ambiguity and unpopularity of the Vietnam War opened a window for veterans like Vonnegut to express publicly their grief through literature. The result was Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that, despite its cynical tone, posits a wholly optimistic approach for wartime veterans to comprehend and cope with the traumas that they continue to experience well after the conclusion of the war.
Table of Contents
Introduction - 1
Chapter One: Historical Context - 8
Chapter Two: Undermining the Myth of World War II - 23
Chapter Three: Literary Catharsis Through Fiction - 41
Conclusion - 61
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