Posthuman Metafiction: Construction of Dystopia through Narrative Strategies in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract

This paper explores the construction of dystopia through posthuman narrative strategies in Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969). It examines how Vonnegut employs non-linear structure, metafiction, and posthuman narration to reimagine identity, agency, and the human condition in a dystopian world. Drawing on Zhang Na’s concept of posthuman narrative developed in Posthuman Becoming Narratives in Contemporary Anglophone Science Fiction, the study integrates narratology with posthuman theory to analyze the dissolution of human-centered perspectives. Zhang’s framework emphasizes narratives that lack self-maintenance and evolve through the reader’s engagement, reflecting a relational and hybrid form of subjectivity. Using discourse analysis, the paper demonstrates how Vonnegut’s text disrupts traditional humanist assumptions by blurring the boundaries between human and non-human experience, realism and metafiction, and individual and collective identity. The research contributes to current discussions on posthumanism by showing how dystopian fiction redefines the human in technologically mediated and politically unstable contexts, offering new ways to conceptualize existence beyond essentialist paradigms.