people aren’t supposed to look back

“‘So,’ said Billy gropingly, ‘I suppose that the idea of preventing war on Earth is stupid, too.’ (Vonnegut).” War and literature are sanguinely germane to Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the Vietnam War, he and postmodern authors analogous depicted the intergalactic—through the wonted use of space travel—as a literal and imaginative frontier to essentially homestead. In Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-five, space travel functions as an escape from protagonist Billy Pilgrim’s psychological problems, elicited from his particular and personal experience in World War II; thus metaphorically exemplifying the lives of the American people and the austere realities they faced in the 1950s through 1970s during the Vietnam War. Vonnegut’s science fiction novel, published in 1969, (Reiko, 1) creates literary escapism from subsisting with the experiences that Vietnam brought and continued to produce. The recurring theme in American science fiction—space travel—emerged from the post-depression period, epitomized in Slaughterhouse-five: Where celestial crossings and the fourth dimension symbolically imply forms of detachment from reality and the repercussions of war.

Continue reading people aren’t supposed to look back