Browsing by Author "Rima SAADAOUI, Imane NASRI"

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    The Poetics of Pain through Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five
    (2018-06) Rima SAADAOUI, Imane NASRI
    ABSTRACT This dissertation discusses pain in Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five” by the help of New Historicist point of view. The chosen corpus of this study is “Slaughterhouse-Five”, a novel written by Kurt Vonnegut within post modern features. It is published in 1969, marked Vonnegut’s artistic and commercial breakthrough. It is based on Vonnegut’s own experiences as a WWII prisoner who witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Germany. Throughout the work, Vonnegut’s protagonist “Billy Pilgrim” is a man who has come “unstuck of time” and suffering from different psychological diseases. Without any forewarning, Billy finds himself suddenly transported to other points in time in his own past or future. Thus, the extraordinary events that happen to Billy from witnessing the Dresden firebombing to being kidnapped by aliens, summarizes many themes of Vonnegut’s work; these include the limitation of human action in seemingly random and meaningless universe, escape from reality, suffering and pain. The main purpose of the present dissertation is to investigate and to explore how, pain, horror and sad feelings change the individual personality that pushes him to escape from the real world to a fictional one, because whenever Billy Pilgrim remembers the things happened in Dresden it seems that he sets out for Tralfamadore. Therefore, the study aims, broadly, at elucidating how a pain, trauma, and horror that occurred factually on the historical scenes of WWII are poetically portrayed through the protagonist of Kurt Vonnegut “Billy Pilgrim”. To achieve this goal, the study called for a New Historicism approach, because this latter is used to contextualize history within a literary text. “Slaughterhouse-Five”, is a work that reproduces the historical involvement within a literary context.