O'Brien v. Vonnegut

O’Brien and Vonnegut have a lot of similarities in their narrative structures. They both have the tendency to repeat the events that happened in their past. Those events are like the ghosts of the past that keep haunting and taunting them. Both O’Brien and Vonnegut seem to use meta-fiction technique (i.e., uses self-reference to comment on the story while telling it) to tell their stories. Their stories do not follow a linear timeline. They are just like their memories—all fragmented. They only remember bits and pieces at a time. When they consciously try to sit down and remember what happened, nothing comes to mind. However, those recollections just come up when they least expect. Another similarity that O’Brien and Vonnegut shares is that they make the readers question their credibility by saying that their stories might or might not be true at all. This is a very unusual approach. Usually authors want readers to believe in what they write. I have never read anything like these two stories before. The stories they tell also hint that they might have experienced PTSD. O’Brien saw Lemon’s gruesome death. Billy was terrified when his father tried to teach him how to swim by throwing him into the pool. That might affect how Billy turns out as a young adult. To others, Billy is that weird kid who cannot help himself. At old age, Billy often cries at night. It might be because of what he saw during the war that keeps him up at night. At the beginning of Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator—which could be Vonnegut himself—tells us that he often gets drunk at nights and starts calling people from his past. Flashbacks, memory lost, persistent re-experiencing, sleeplessness are all the symptoms of PTSD. Both of these stories show that one’s past bad experience, especially the traumatic ones, negatively affects how a person turns out and how he chooses to perceive the world around him.