『제5도살장』의 이중구조: 지구인 보네것과 트랠패머도어 인 필그림

Abstract

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel about the humanist Kurt Vonnegut who tells a tale of Billy Pilgrim, the Tralfamadorian fatalist. In chapter 1 of the novel Vonnegut tells of himself and his motives in writing his Dresden novel, and from chapters 2 to 10 presents Pilgrim's story, offering final comments in the last chapter. In this narrative frame Pilgrim's story is a negative example to emphasize the importance of the author's humanist viewpoint. So the structure of Slaughterhouse-Five recalls Dryden's tragicomedy in which the comic action as an underplot serves the main plot. In Slaughterhouse-Five, in fact, Kurt Vonnegut separates actions of his own as an autobiographical fictional hero from those of Billy Pilgrim as an antagonist. Vonnegut's autobiographical story is part of the novel's artistic construction, and forms a narrative frame in which Vonnegut contrasts himself, the novel's genuine hero who faces the horror of Dresden that he suffered through and lived to write about, with Billy Pilgrim, another Dresden survivor who escapes into a fantasy. The science-fictional mode in the novel provides Pilgrim's tale with a convincing form of fantasy that characterizes science fiction as escapist literature. As the narrator Vonnegut attributes Pilgrim's time travel to his fantasy, his time travel is used as a main narrative device, much as the Tralfamadorian philosophy of time is an escape from the concept of temporal linearity. As Vonnegut offers Pilgrim's story as a negative exemplum, science-fictional themes and trappings function as a trap; readers are first encouraged to accept the unacceptable Tralfamadorian perspective and then to refute it when they see the real meaning of Pilgrim's fantasy. For this purpose, Vonnegut experiments with a narrative form and repetitive patterns that rely on the reader's psychology.