The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse...

The Thought-experiments in Kurt Vonneguts Slaughterhouse Five or the Childrens Crusade: A Duty Dance With Death In 1945 Kurt Vonnegut witnessed a horrific series of bombings that led to the destruction of the German city of Dresden, where he was taken as a prisoner of war. The controversial fire-storm raid, carried out by bombers of the Royal Air Force and US Air Force, took casualties of up to a quarter million people (Klinkowitz x-xi). As a prisoner of war, Vonnegut was forced to participate as a corpse miner in the citys cleanup process. Upon his return from the Second World War, Vonnegut decided to write a book describing his traumatic war experiences. After twenty years of struggling with research, failing to recall personal†¦show more content†¦Although drastic presentations such as space and time travel potentially hinder the plausibility of the storyline and detach the reader from the text, it is this exact element in Slaughterhouse Five that returns the reader back into the story, bringing closer the relationship between the reader and Vonnegut himself. In this sense, this ex perimental form of narrative creates another Chrono-Synclastic Infundibulum: a place in the novel where both the reader and the author coexist. With this new form of storytelling Vonnegut commits himself to a novel that could possibly fail. However he takes this risk in order to produce a novel that reflects his personal experiences more closely than if he had abided with conventional styles. By inserting the readers and himself into the novel, Vonnegut thus subjects the readers to his personal experiences more directly; the act of reading Slaughterhouse Five becomes a simulation of Vonneguts past in Dresden. While Slaughterhouse Five was a novel intended to reflect Vonneguts personal experiences in Dresden, the delivery of the storyline suggests that the novel is anything but an autobiography. Instead, with space and time travel placed into the novel-without any scientific explanation-Slaughterhouse Five reads like a