Crisis,Deviation And Illusion

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most influential postmodernist novelists in American literature,whose superb narrative skills and unique writing styles have been lauded throughout the past decades.Based on his personal experience as a prisoner of war during the Second World War,Vonnegut’s most significant masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five recounts the story of Bombing of Dresden through the representation of the life of the protagonist Billy Pilgrim.The novel is characterized by Vonnegut’s customary black humor style and anti-traditional narrative techniques,exposing the cruelty of war,the absurdity of society as well as the spiritual emptiness of humankind.Behind the art of novelistic representation is therefore Vonnegut’s strong anti-war sentiment,his appeal to peace,and his critique of contemporary society.Vonnegut’s non-linear narrative in Slaughterhouse-Five has drawn critical attention both in and outside China to the spatiality of its text,and spatial criticism has vastly been applied in the analysis of the novel’s spatial imagery.Regretfully,there is as yet almost a dearth of studies approaching the novel from the perspective of heterotopias.Based on his concern for marginalized groups,the French thinker Michel Foucault proposed the concept of heterotopias,which is a special space that rebels against,or even reverses the order of the conventional conceptualization of space.In contrast to spatial criticism,heterotopias emphasize the heterogeneity,marginality,and Otherness of space,exploring the special nature of the Other in societal space from the dichotomy of marginalized and mainstream culture.Drawing from the insights of the Foucauldian heterotopias,this thesis aims to study three main kinds of heterotopias interlaced in Slaughterhouse-Five:heterotopias of crisis,heterotopias of deviation,and heterotopias of illusion.The crisis heterotopias take in the vulnerable groups in a crisis state,reflecting the existential plight of humankind in wartime;the deviant heterotopias harbor people whose behaviors are different from the norms of ordinary groups in the society,revealing callous human relationships and the alienated state of humanity at that time;and finally,the illusionary heterotopias can be deemed as a space that might hopefully provide spiritual comfort to those living in marginality.Taken together,the novelistic representation of these three types of heterotopias at once reflects the extreme survival dilemma of humankind in wartime--the cruelty of genocide,the deprivation of human rights,and the existential plight of the Other in a callous,alienated and exclusive contemporary society.Moreover,this heterotopian writing exposes Vonnegut’s call for peace,dissolution of alienation,respect for the Other,and concern for the marginalized,as well as his profound anti-war thoughts and humanistic concerns.This thesis is an attempt to interpret heterotopias of Slaughterhouse-Five,hopefully,to contribute to further research on Vonnegut’s anti-war novels and Foucault’s theory of heterotopias.