Says Who?

As in Dante’s Inferno, the Author of Slaughter House-Five, Kurt Vonnegut, employs a literary device by meddling with the time-line and changing the narrator every so often. For instance, the change of narrator that occurs in the Holocaust book is a transition from the writer of the book within the book, who is depicted in first-person narration, while he to whom all the events described is told by an omnipresent voice. The ubiquitous narrator is he who describes how “I was there. So was my old war buddy, Bernard V. O’Hare” (Vonnegut Pg. 67), and by so doing so, makes us be aware of the fact that the first person narrator is living in the post-war future of Billy Pilgrim, who’s story he describes in third-person form: “Billy owned a lovely Georgian home in Ilium” (Vonnegut Pg. 61). I believe that the Vonnegut makes this transition from the narrator to narrated (both being the same person) to stress how old Billy Pilgrim the veteran is an entirely different person than the suicidal Billy Pilgrim, the one who marched and walked “bobbing up-and –down, up-and-down…” (Vonnegut Pg. 65).

The transition between narrator can also be found within Dante’s Inferno when Dante the writer makes a side note on what he describes to be occurring to Dante he who journeyed through Hell. Although Dante the writer and Dante the traveler’s messages are conveyed via the same narrator’s position (first-person), there is an obvious change in tone and emotions among the variation of speaker, making the author mark the importance of the change that Dante underwent on his journey through the darkness. Dante the traveler is a more fearful and perplexed character, saying how he is one who “even as one who dreams that he is dreaming that he is harmed and, dreaming, wishes he were dreaming, thus desiring that which is, as if it were not…” (Dante. Inferno Canto 30.136-138). While Dante the trekker is so, Dante the writer is more narcissistic, trait which can be observed in reference to Dante’s description of the snakes and Florentine Thieves’ metamorphosis: “Let Lucan now be silent, where he sings of sad Sabellus and Nasidius, and wait to hear what flies off from my bow… Let Ovid now be silent…if his verse has made of one a serpent, one a fountain, I do not envy him; he never did transmute two natures, face to face, so that both forms were ready to exchange matter” (Dante. Inferno. Canto 15.97-102). Hence, we see two very different narrators who, although they speak in the same person and of the same person and are the same person, are so describing the physical and mental change of one being, as in Slaughter House-Five.

Finally, even though the different narrators in these works show the transformation of one being, we must not fail to notice the transformation of the writer as he describes his hardships, how they have shaped him, and how he continues to be shaped through his solemn recollection. Remembering the past is not consistently simple, but it must be done in order to change oneself, especially for the better.