Narrating The Story Of A Narrator.

Generally when we read a book we know who the narrator is. While reading Slaughter House-Five I was confused because it seemed to me as if three people were narrating the same story. Those three different people were: the author, Billy in the present
(The one that lives the actual moments) “I like the way you are”(Vonnegut,121) and Billy in the past ( the one that tells the story of Billy in the present) He hadn’t told anybody about all the time traveling he’d done”(Vonnegut 121).

As I continued to read I recognized how the three narrators where really the same person. The author Kurt Vonnegut and how Billy Pilgrim may be a representation of him. “That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book.” (Vonnegut, 125). This quote implies that he is the same person telling the story from three different points of view as if he (the author) did not want each of the three to interfere with each other because each of them saw life in a different way. From the beginning of the novel Vonnegut comes straight forward to say “All this happened, more or less. There war parts anyway, are pretty much true (Vonnegut 1) so he is saying that what he is about to tell us really did happen, more or less.

The main question that we ask ourselves then is why, why does Vonnegut change his story in war adding this weird things like aliens. I say that we won’t ever know the real answer of this we can say that it was maybe because he wanted to but that would be very simple. He may have done this because war for him was not a proud moment of his life not something he would want to remember but the again he is writing a book about it. So in order to change and in some way make more interesting or worthwhile for him that moment of his life Vonnegut may have added these weird aspects to his story.