Narrative as Terapeutic Discursive Practice in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

The present thesis argues that Slaughterhouse-Five is a piece of therapeutic narrative. The act of writing the book is a therapeutic device for the author himself to come to terms with his personal experience of history and with the unbearable state of being a survivor of this historical experience, which leaves the author no choice but to write about it and to find a way of expression. In this sense the novel was born out of a must of writing. On the other hand while coming to terms with his mental wounds the author offers a therapeutic perspective through Billy Pilgrim’s story to any reader who is equally puzzled by the historical event of World War II. Through Billy Pilgrim’s being “unstuck in time”, his encounters with the Tralfamadorians and their way of perception a solution is provided to the problem: with the radically different concepts of time, history, remembrance and truth the question of why is not answered, but the impossibility of giving an explanatory answer is revealed, which makes the question as meaningless as the historical events themselves are. In this sense Vonnegut provides the reader with a way out of the state of being at a loss. He does this through exploring his own idea of humanitarianism without going moralistic on the topic of the horror of being a human creature among the turmoil of history. He outlines what it means according to him to “behave decently in an indecent society” (At Millennium’s End, viii).egyetemiangol nyelv és irodalo