Gotcha!

Reading through chapter six of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five I came across a very compromising passage which will help us understand the narration of the novel. It is right when Billy Pilgrim arrives to Dresden as a war prisoner, most precisely, when he crawled out of the boxcar. “Someone behind him in the boxcar said, “Oz.” That was I. That was me. The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana” (Slaughterhouse-Five, p.148). I rushed through the words once and halted. Then I wondered who “That was I. That was me.” was referring to. I read Indianapolis, which seemed completely out of context at first glance. But wait a minute, that doesn’t make sense. I have learned, through much misinterpretation, that no word is ever employed randomly: they all have a specific purpose. I decided to Google Kurt Vonnegut and find out about his hometown. Of course, it happened to be Indianapolis, Indiana. There is no doubt in my mind that one of the characters in the story, and a part time narrator of the novel, is Kurt Vonnegut himself. And that’s not where our thinking should end, for if we go back to the context we clearly identify two facts. First, we can tell the present excerpt is being narrated as a third person: “And then they saw Billy Pilgrim in his blue toga and silver shoes, with his hands in a muff” (Slaughterhouse-Five, p.149). That complements our hypothesis that Vonnegut narrates as third person, and shares the narration with Billy’s first person. Second, we find concrete proof linking novel and author. To clarify, we have found that Billy and Vonnegut manage some sort of parallelism. They are both at Dresden at the same time, making distinction between them as individuals. Thus far, we have come to understand the narration in hands of two different individuals under similar points of view. One carries out the narrative in third person and the other, far more personal and familiar, has in his hands our understanding as a first person narrator.