Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five Narrative Analysis

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The narrative structure in Slaughterhouse-Five is nonlinear. One of the greatest distinctive and unique aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five is the structure to which it is written. All through the novel, Billy Pilgrim journeys irrepressibly to non-chronological moments of his life, or as Vonnegut verbalizes, “paying random visits to all events in between.” (23). The structure of the novel is eccentric and does not actually have a well-defined beginning, middle, and end in the progression of the narrative. There is continuous movement amongst the future, past, and present in erratic ways. Vonnegut’s narrative consist of rapid brief paragraphs which do not follow a straight timeline, but as an alternative jolts forward and backward

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