Metafictional Narratives with Self-Reflection: A Critical Study in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

This paper demonstrates the operational mechanism of narrative in metafiction with self-reflection taking Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five as example. It seeks to provide answers to charges of metafiction’s tendentious self-reflexivity and suggest how this so-called tendentiousness is in fact a strategy to re-vitalize an apparently flaccid tradition of fiction. Vonnegut is concerned fundamentally with problems of value: self-awareness, self-realization, and self-fulfillment; the nature and destiny of man. It shows how self-reflexivity not only warrants a narrative structure impervious to conventions of reading fiction, but also adopts an involuntarily disjunctive aesthetic at various levels.