Addressing social amnesia in Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut

Résumé

This article presents a critical and literary analysis of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five or The Children’s Crusade (1969), focusing on the particularities related to the dialogue between Vonnegut’s work and History, such as the influence of the cultural tradition in portraying World War II in works of art. In order to do that, we begin with a brief presentation of Vonnegut’s biography and the historical context in which he and his work are inserted. This contextualization is indispensable due to the aforementioned dialogue that the novel maintains with History and, by being the former, in part, autobiographical. We aim to show that the lack of available information and publicity about Dresden’s attack at the time was more than just an accident or oversight, but a fabricated situation in which the events surrounding it are intentionally left out from “official” History, constituting a process labeled “social amnesia” (BURKE, 1997). Along our analysis, we evidence Vonnegut’s awareness of this condition of alienation and investigate  the author’s strategy for breaking with the “romanticized” view of World War II, especially his concerns about the (re)construction of the social memory on the events that involved Dresden’s massacre. These observations will be done based on theoretical concepts from the fields of Literature and History, Comparative Literature, History and Memory, and include texts by theoreticians such as Linda Hutcheon, Peter Burke, Jacques Le Goff, Tânia Franco Carvalhal and Sandra Nitrini.