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1、分类号 _ 密级 - UDC _ 编号 论文题目 荒诞写作手法呈现的混乱世界 一第五号屠场的后现代特征研究 A Chaotic World by Absurd Writing Techniques the Postmodernist Features of Slaughterhouse-Five 研究生 ： _ 谭红梅 学 号： _ 31005008 所在学院： 外国语学院 专 业： 英语语言文学 研究方向：美国文学 指导教师： 王松涛 2013 年 05 月 30 日 A Chaotic World by Absurd Writing Techniques The Postmodernist
2、 Features of Slaughterhouse-Five by Tan Hongmei Under the Supervision of Professor Wang Songtao Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of Master Arts English Department Foreign Language College Inner Mongolia University May 30, 2013 Tr Declaration I hereby declare that t
3、his submission is my own work and that, to the best of my knowledge and belief, it contains no material preciously published or written by another person or material which has to a substantial extent been accepted for the award of any otiier degree or diploma at any university or other institutes of
4、 higher learning, except where due acknowledgement has been made in the text. Acknowledgement A number of people were especially helpful in the preparation of this thesis. I want to express my sincere thanks firstly to Professor Wang, my academic supervisor, for offering strict guidance, generous he
5、lp and pertinent criticisms that he gave to me throughout three years of graduate study. Professor Wang Songtao also injected enlightenment and energy into the writing of this thesis, without which the present stage of this thesis would never have been reached. Special thanks are due to all my teach
6、ers during my M.A studies at Inner Mongolia University for their information and inspiring courses from which the ideas in this thesis have come, as well as to all the authors of the works I have quoted from. I should also give my appreciation to my supportive schoolmates for generally helping with
7、information on thesis-writing. I am grateful to them for generously sharing with me their collection of books and other materials that are very useful. Finally, I would like to thank my parents who have always been encouraging and supporting me during my writing this thesis with their invaluable lov
8、e. Abstract A Chaotic World by Absurd Writing Techniques the Postmodernist Features of Slaughterhouse-Five Tan Hongmei Kurt Vonnegut is one of the representatives of the American postmodernist authors. His masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five presents the absurd aspects of the modem American society by t
9、he postmodernist writing techniques. Postmodernism became mature in the United States after the Second World War with the emergence of the black humor as a marker of its formation. The research on Slaughterhouse-Five from home and abroad mainly focused on the black humor or one or several aspects of
10、 postmodern features instead of a comprehensive study. This thesis makes a detailed elaboration on Slaughterhouse-Five postmodern writing techniques by combining the social background with the authors life experience， showing the era background of postmodern writing techniques and its impact on the
11、time at that time. The first part of this thesis mainly introduces the personal experience of the author himself, the story, as well as the predecessors1 research and the purpose and significance of this thesis. The second part is the main body of this thesis including three chapters analyzing postm
12、odern writing characteristics of Slaughterhouse-Five mainly from the following aspects: the introduction of the postmodernist writing techniques; detail analysis of the black humor style in Slaughterhouse-Five which not only inherits the style of black humor war, death, and the anti-hero but also ma
13、kes unprecedented innovation of writing skills scientific elements; other postmodern characteristics in Slaughterhouse-Five. After World War II? the emergence of the black humor marks the post-modernism reached its peak making it the main feature of postmodern writing model. Chapter-five is conclusi
14、on. This thesis also reflects many social problems at that time by the analysis of the postmodernist features in Slaughterhouse-Five. After the WWII, Americans economy and technology came to a high speed development time. It seemed that peopled living standard had improved a lot as a result of the g
15、reat changes brought by modernized life. On the contrary, people were not happy at all due to the great pain brought by the war. Therefore, there were all kinds of social problems in America during 1950s to 1960s. The former literary form can not fully present the social realities. It was at that ti
16、me that postmodernism came to the stage of literature. Postmodernism shows people an absurd world which can not be fully expressed only by words and logics. As a result, the chaotic world can only be presented by the absurd writing techniques. KEYWORDS: Slaughterhouse-Five; postmodernism; black humo
17、r 冯尼古特是美国后现代派作家的代表，其代表作第五号屠场运用后现代 写作手法展现了当代美国社会的荒诞性。后现代主义成熟于二战后的美国，并且 以黑色幽默的出现作为其形成标志。国内外对第五号屠场的研究主要集中于 其黑色幽默特征或针对于后现代特征的某一个或几个方面，而没有对其后现代写 作手法进行全面研究。本文结合美国当时的社会背景及作者的生活经历对第五 号屠场的后现代写作手法作了较详尽的阐述，进而能够较为清晰地展现后现代 写作手法产生的时代背景及其影响。 本文的第一部分主要介绍作家本人的个人经历、第五号屠场的故事情节、 以及前人的研究成果和本文研究的目的和意义。第二部分是本文的主体它包括三 个章节，
18、主要从以下方面剖析第五号屠场的后现代写作特征。首先介绍后现 代主义及其产生的背景；其次详尽剖析第五号屠场黑色幽默风格，第五号 屠场不仅沿袭了黑色幽默固有的风格 战争、死亡和反英雄式的主人公，冯 尼古特还对写作手法作了前所未有的创新科幻色彩。最 后阐析了第五号屠 场的其它后现代特征。二战后黑色幽默的出现标志着后现代主义达到其顶峰， 因此也成为后现代写作模式的主要特点。 第五章是本文的结论。通过对第五号屠场后现代写作手法的分析，本文 也从很多不同角度影射出当时的社会问题。二战后的美国，经济和科技得到了迅 猛发展。现代化的生活给人们带来很大变化，表面上人们生活水平有了很大提高， 但战争给人们带来的伤
19、痛并没有得到抚平。因此，二十世纪 50 年代至 60 年代的 美国充斥着各种社会问题。基于此种社会背景产生的文学形式也必然是包含着荒 诞的成分，也只有这样怪 诞的写作手法才足以表现当时动荡不安的社会现状。 关键词：第五号屠场；后现代主义；黑色幽默 Contents 原创性声 M . i Declaration . ii Acknowledgement . iii Abstract . iv m . vi Contents . vii Chapter 1 Introduction . . . 1 1.1 Kurt Vonnegut War Experience . 1 1.2 Brief Int
20、roduction to Slaughterhouse-Five . 2 1.3 Literature Review . 5 1A Significance and Purposes of the Research . 7 Chapter 2 Postmodernism and Its Social Background . . . 9 2.1 Contemporary Social Background . 9 2.2 Main Features of Postmodernism . 12 2.3 Black HumorMain Stream of Postmodernism . 13 Ch
21、apter 3 Black Humor Style in Slaughterhouse-Five . 16 3.1 BillyAntihero . 16 3.LI One with No Dignity . 16 3.1.2 Indifference towards War and Death . 17 3.2 Theme of War and Death . 19 3.2.1 Dresden Massacre . 19 3.2.2 Billys Fatalism . 20 3.3 Theme of Absurdity . 23 3.3.1 Tralfamadorian Concepts to
22、ward Time, Death and Universe . 23 3.3.2 Resigned Acceptance . 25 Chapter 4 Other Postmodern Features in Slaughterhouse-Five 28 4.1 Exposed Trace . 28 4.1.1 Vonnegutthe Character Himself . 28 4.1.2 The Authors Remarks on the Novel . 31 4.2 Multiple Narrative perspectives . 33 4.2.1 First Person Narr
23、ator . 34 4.2.2 Third Person Narrator . 36 43 Fragmented Plots . 39 4.3.1 Nonlinear Narrative . 39 4.3.2 The Technique of Repetitions . 42 4.4 Parody of Jesus Christ . 44 Chapter 5 Conclusion . 48 Bibliography . 51 Chapter One Introduction 1.1 Kurt Vonnegufs War Experience KurtVonnegut was bom in In
24、dianapolis in 1922, a descendant of prominent German-American families. His father was an architect and his mother was a noted beauty. Both spoke German fluently but declined to teach Kurt the language in light of widespread anti-German sentiment following World War I. Family money helped send Vonne
25、gufs two siblings to private schools. The Great Depression hit hard in the 1930s, though, and the family placed Kurt in public school while it moved to more modest accommodations. While in high school, Vonnegut edited the school daily newspaper. He attended college at Cornell for a little over two y
26、ears, with instructions from his father and brother to study chemistry, a subject at which he did not excel. He also wrote for the Cornell Daily Sun. In 1943 he enlisted in the U.S. Army. In 1944 his mother committed suicide, and Vonnegut was taken prisoner following the Battle of the Bulge, in the
27、Ardennes Forest of Belgium. After the war, Vonnegut married and entered a master degree program in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He also worked as a reporter for the Chicago City News Bureau. His master thesis, titled Fluctuations Between Good and Evil in Simple Tales, was rejected. He
28、departed for Schenectady, New York, to take a job in public relations at a General Electric research laboratory. Vonnegut left GE in 1951 to devote himself to full-time writing. During the 1950s. Vonnegut published short stories in national magazines. Player Piano, his first novel, appeared in 1952.
29、 Sirens of Titan was published in 1959. followed by Mother Night 962), Cats Cradle (1963), God Bless You, Mr. Rose-water (1965), and his most highly praised work, Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). Vonnegut wrote prolifically until his death in 2007. Kurt Vonnegut tells the story by his own experiences in
30、WWII. Therefore he comes up in Chapter 1 and the last chapter as a main character in order to make the reader believe the story is true. He was deeply hurt by the dreadful war. However, he attempted to express what he had experienced during the war in a quite new way. Therefore, Slaughterhouse-Five
31、came in being for meeting the need of comforting and relieving his trauma. In the novels he aims to claim his attitude towards the war and the events happened in that period. He employs black humor which is the first and key wave of postmodernism. 1,2 Brief Introduction to Slaughterhouse-Five The no
32、vel is based on Kurt Vonnegut own experience in World War II. In the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces9 firebombing of Dresden. Vonnegut, like his protagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of bumed-out Dresden.
33、His surviving captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. His task continued until the Russians came and the war ended Vonnegut survived by chance, confined as a prisoner of war (POW) in a well-insulated meat locker， and so missed the cataclysmic moment of attack emerging the day a
34、fter into the charred mins of a cmce-beautifiil cityscape, Vonnegut once said that he always intended to write about the experience but found himself incapable of doing so for more than twenty years. Although he attempted to describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, th
35、is strategy never worked for him. Billy Pilgrim5 s unhinged timeshifting, a mechanism for dealing with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonneguf s solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale. Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war. It is so
36、 short and jumbled and jangled， ” he explains in Chapter 1, “because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre.v The jumbled structure of the novel and the long delay between its conception and completion serve as testaments to a very persona struggle with heart-wrenching material. But th
37、e timing of the novels publication also deserves notice: in 1969, the United States was in the midst of the dismal Vietnam War. Vonnegut was an outspoken pacifist and critic of the conflict. Slaughterhouse-Five revolves around the willful incineration of 100,000 civilians, in a city of extremely dub
38、ious military significance, during an arguably just war. Appearing when it did, then, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which incendiary technology was once more being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious cause. Billy Pilgrim, the novels protagonist, has become “unstuck in time.” He travels between periods of his life, unable to control which period he lands in. As a result, the narrative is not chronological or linear. Instead, it jumps back and forth in t