Slaughterhouse Five in Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt

Slaughterhouse Five In Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut vividly recalls living through the 1945 firebombing of Dresden during World War II. Much like the novel's hero Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut was caught in the firestorm that consumed the city. Like Billy Pilgrim, Vonnegut only survived the bombings by chance. During the Allied bombing of Dresden, Vonnegut was already a prisoner of war. He was confined by his captors in a meat locker inside a slaughterhouse. The well-sealed confinement shielded Vonnegut from incineration and suffocation as the firebombs consumed all the oxygen.

After the firebombing, the author was then captured and put to work digging charred bodies out of the burnt rubble. Because of the parallelisms between Vonnegut's experiences and Billy Pilgrim's ordeal, many critics contend that Slaughterhouse-Five should be read as a memoir. However, even though Slaughterhouse-Five was hatched in events vividly recalled by the author, it does not fall neatly into the genre of the memoir. Rather, the book is better classified as an autobiographical novel.

Much like a memoir, an autobiographical novel often stems from an important period in an author's life. However, the techniques used to narrate these events vary between these two related, but distinct literary genres. In a memoir for example, an author uses first-person voice in order to draw the reader deep into their narratives, creating a story that reads with power and immediacy. The tradeoff, however, lies in the limited time span covered by the memoir.

Furthermore, a memoir writer would not be able to explore the insights and point-of-view of other characters. Parts of Slaughterhouse-Five read like a memoir, particularly where Vonnegut uses the first person voice, using the character of Billy Pilgrim to narrate his experiences in Dresden. The author even inserts himself as a character throughout key events, such as the latrine at the POW camp and digging in the corpse mines in Dresden.

The insertions serve to remind the reader that though fiction, the events described in the novel actually happened, to people like Billy Pilgrim/Kurt Vonnegut. However, Vonnegut also uses several techniques not found in the works of noted memoir writers such as Tobias Wolff and Anne Frank. For example, Vonnegut also employs a third-person point-of-view, where an omniscient narrator goes into the minds of several other characters. Thus, in addition to Billy Pilgrim, the reader also gains insight into the motivations and thoughts of other characters as well.

Vonnegut also employs a time-shifting progression that takes the reader back and forth from the present (1968), to the meat locker in World War II to Billy's birth (1920) and even to his death (1976). The novel thus covers a much greater time period than most memoirs. Vonnegut even.