Billy Pilgrim's 'Like Nabokov'

Like Nabokov, Vonnegut begins by building a narrative frame for what will become the core of the novel – Billy Pilgrim’s story. In this part of the novel (the first chapter and eventually some extra paragraphs), Vonnegut uses a first person narrator, who becomes immediately associated with the author himself. One could easily argue that this is exactly the purpose of the author, since he uses mostly autobiographical references to make this connection clear. The most relevant proofs he present the reader with regard two practical aspects of the novel: the title and the dedication. In the very first page, the narrator talks about a certain Gerhard Muller, a cab driver from Dresden who meets the narrator and his war friend Bernard O’Hare when

‘ I guess.’
‘ You know what I say to people when I hear they’re writing anti-war-books?’
‘ No. What do you say, Harrison Starr?’
‘I say, “Why don’t you write and anti-glacier book instead?”’
What he meant, fo course, was that there would always be wars, that they were as easy to stop as glaciers. I believe that, too.

The narrator is also concerned about the technical choices he has to make: style, structure, language. He expresses his anxiety to Sam, his editor:

‘ Sam⎯here’s the book.’
It is so short and jumbled and jangled, Sam, because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever

Billy is unreliable in the sense that we cannot take his word as a scientific truth or his adventures as an accurate account of what happened. In spite of this, he is not a liar. His role requires him to give a blurred, occasionally embellished picture of Vonnegut’s war experience, from which the audience has to extrapolate the reality. The author’s interventions, moreover, do not stop after the first chapter. He has two primary ways of maintaining his contact with the audience: by inserting some references into Billy’s narrative or by breaking through Billy’s