Truth & Trauma in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

Trauma is an extreme condition through which we can understand how the mechanisms of shame and pride significantly influence our ability to both collectively and personally identify and articulate tricky truths. The same skew of perspectivism and bias that shapes an individual’s truth can scale at the collective level, —from the nuclear family unit up to national, continental, and even global levels— often to alarming consequences. Kurt Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-Five induces a sensory experience of trauma upon his readers in a way that synthesizes the collective memory of Americans with the profound alienation that results from experiences that directly counter and challenge the truth foundational to the collective memory. My analysis of Vonnegut’s novel is the beginning of a larger question about how the humanities (in this case, literature specifically) provide an invaluable mechanism to depict experienced truths otherwise inaccessible to those who have not directly experienced them. Understanding the limits of language alone to portray a sensory experience helps shape the careful context and creative techniques necessary to simulate an experienced truth that in turn shapes the collective memory of that experience.