Slaughterhouse-five and Catch-22 Compare Contrast
Uploaded by littleindian on Nov 26, 2006
Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut utilize structure and imagery to convey their antiwar viewpoints; however, Heller incorporates irony while Vonnegut adds motif. It is through the stories of Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-five and Yossarian in Catch-22 that the reader learns how war negatively affects the soldiers involved (Wallin.)
Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut use a non-chronological structure in their novels. At first, the novels skip from episode to episode in a nonspecific order that forms an illogical mess. Not only does this accomplish presenting the protagonists as insane, but it causes the reader to experience life as someone who has been traumatized by what they witnessed in war (“Time and Structure” 9-11.) It is for this reason a traditional structure could not be applied to the novels because the illogical order of events that seem to have no relevance forces the reader to experience insanity. Vonnegut goes farther than just using the non-chronological structure of the novel as a whole by writing in short chapters. These chapters contain short paragraphs that are divided into unrelated sections. Vonnegut uses this unique structure because the way events are told to the reader is similar to how undifferentiated schizophrenics think and communicate ideas which supports the idea that Billy Pilgrim is insane. Undifferentiated schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, usually caused by a traumatic event, with symptoms where the patient speaks in fragments and detachment from reality (Gerrig and Zimbardo 497-503.) The traumatic event that caused Billy to become insane was the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. As Billy tries to justify the pointless destruction of an innocent city and killing of thousands of civilians, he cannot reach a logical solution. Because he cannot justify the firebombing, his brain metaphorically shut down.
As Kurt Vonnegut used structure in Slaughterhouse-five to represent the soldiers’ insanity, Joseph Heller incorporates it into Catch-22 in a similar fashion. Unlike Slaughterhouse-five where scene changes have a time period assigned to them, Heller switches from past, present, and future tense without establishing a definite ‘now’ as a reference point. The structure allows Heller to take a scene and “juxtapose it with another to show their relevance to one another” (“Time and Structure” 9-11.) The beginning of Chapter I is “set out of sequence in order to establish the importance of the...