서강대학교

초록/요약

In this thesis, I read and analyze Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five through a cognitive analytical framework. In order to do this, I rely on Endel Tulving’s concept of episodic memory as “information about temporally dated episodes or events, and temporal-spatial relations among these events” (Tulving, “Episodic” 385). Tulving defines this concept to require autonoetic consciousness, which is “the kind of consciousness that mediates an individual’s awareness of his or her existence and identity in subjective time extending from the personal past through the present to the personal future” (Tulving, “Memory” 2). Applying this concept to Slaughterhouse-Five allows multiple new avenues of analysis: first and foremost, it allows the assertion that Billy Pilgrim is not traveling through time, but instead through memory. Furthermore, I argue that there are two distinct spheres of memory within which Billy operates in the novel, war memory and non-war memory. These two spheres–in combination with the presence or absence of autonoetic consciousness within them–will be examined and used to produce a metaphor based on the impossibility of Billy to create meaning from his war experiences. After establishing memory as a metaphor in the novel, this thesis closely examines Billy’s lack of autonoetic consciousness in war memory and his gain of it in non-war memory. This both strengthens and suggests a previously-unexplored dichotomy operating in the background of the novel, which can be seen through memory as a metaphor. This metaphor represents either the impossibility or potential for meaning to be able to be created from the assorted war or non-war experiences of Billy, and possibly through this character, Kurt Vonnegut. After examining and establishing three periods of analytical scholarly work related to Slaughterhouse-Five, I leverage this metaphor to suggest a new scholarly shift in regards to the novel. The way that Kurt Vonnegut forces Billy to experience his memories, denying him autonoetic consciousness as a remembrant, makes Billy’s war memories meaningless for him. Billy cannot connect and draw cause-and-effect relationships from his war memories because of the way that he experiences them. The meaninglessness of Billy’s memories, therefore, metaphorically represents the senseless nature of war and violence outside of the novel, seen through the way Billy, as a remembrant, remembers.