Chapter Two: Style

The feeling you get when you try to figure out Slaughterhouse Five's narrative style.

In chapter two, Billy Pilgrim jumps around time a lot. For example, Billy is trying to leave a party and drive away. However, the very intoxicated Billy cannot locate his car's steering wheel. Since he was in the backseat, he obviously was not going to find a steering wheel. In his inebriated state, he concluded that the steering wheel was stolen, and promptly passed out. In the next paragraph, Billy "... still felt drunk, was still angered by the stolen steering wheel. He was back in World War Two again, behind the German lines." This "time jumping" causes the narrative to have a disjointed and almost broken quality to it. However, Vonnegut used this in order to prove a point. The point of a narrative is to explicitly tell a coherent story. Narratives (well, good ones at least) make sense of their subjects, providing the reader with a deeper understanding of it. This is the reason why Vonnegut makes the novel disjointed. He did not want to simply make a narrative about Dresden because that would entail him making sense of the events. As the bird in chapter one demonstrated, it is impossible to make sense of a massacre or any other large-scale destruction.