Seyedeh Roghayeh Aleshafiee
Volume 12, Issue 16 , April 2016, , Pages 15-30
Abstract
The present research attempts to accomplish a re-reading of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, specifically in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical frame of mind centralized on the notion of ‘becoming’. This central idea of becoming versus being grounds Deleuze’s philosophical ...
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The present research attempts to accomplish a re-reading of the novel Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, specifically in the light of Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical frame of mind centralized on the notion of ‘becoming’. This central idea of becoming versus being grounds Deleuze’s philosophical and critical approach toward every phenomenon, and particularly, discourse such as art, philosophy and literature. Like other post-structuralists, Deleuze believes that the major problem with the traditional Western thought since the time of Plato has been the essentiality of transcendentalism and concludes that this needs to be subverted. He accomplishes his theory by verifying the necessity of overcoming Platonism and thus, authorizing becoming. In fact, by deviating from an established origin or transcendental universe we ground the thought on the immanence of becoming. In this view, everything is just flowing in the flux of becoming-life. From Deleuze’s viewpoint, philosophy, literature and science are the powers of becoming by entailing new non-actualized possibilities. Accordingly, the present research reads through the lines of Slaughterhouse-Five as a text of becoming opposed to verisimilitude. This study tries to show the dominance of Deleuzean thought through the investigation of elements like form, the episodic narrative, the split time and psyches of characters, as well as the absence of causal relation between events. Thus, it is found that under the light of Deleuze’s notion of minor literature, Slaughterhouse-Five brings various forms of becoming in play to liberate text, thought, philosophy, history and life itself from the pre-determined images and definitions in order to show how the writer tried to cope with the traumatic memory of war and massacre by experiencing different forms of becoming and re-narrating war events from different perspectives.