Schizophrenia in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)

Abstract

This dissertation examines the notion of Schizophrenia as a psychological phenomenon, resulted from the desperate situation after the Second World war and the Cold War and the technological advancement, and shows how Postmodern writers could portray it perfectly through their literary texts and individual characters. As a result, this study is an attempt to analyze from an eclectic approach, Kurt Vonnegut’s influential anti-war book Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), written in the aftermath of World War II and published during the Vietnam war, a time of great disorder and confusion. In the midst of this chaos, people were burdened with heavy thoughts and complex ideas, desperately trying to find meaning in their lives. Vonnegut's work beautifully captures this psychological state, both in its characters and in the structure of the text itself. Through the cultural approach, the study aims to study Postmodernism as a cultural movement which served as the base for the emergence of schizophrenia as a psychological phenomenon, it also aims to study how Kurt Vonnegut could produce a literary text and individual characters in which both exhibits characteristics of schizophrenia through the use of fragmentation as a facet of schizophrenia. Additionally, using a psychoanalytic approach, this study delves into the protagonist's schizophrenia as a result of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). It explores the impact of this experience on his roles as a husband, father, and optometrist. Additionally, the study examines how Billy's journey as a time and space traveler. The result of study proves that Slaughterhouse-Five is a highly Postmodern schizophrenic novel, and that Billy Pilgrim proved to be the Postmodern subject who developed schizophrenia as a way to heal from the war scars and to cope with unforgettable painful memories of war.