As I've mentioned before, as a teenager I was a serial reader of Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five. When I read this little frame-up from a long essay on Vonnegut on the Dish, it was an absolute eureka:
William Deresiewicz argues Slaughterhouse-Five is "not about time travel and flying saucers, it’s about PTSD":
The novel is framed by Vonnegut’s account of trying to write about Dresden—of trying to remember Dresden. But a different kind of memory became the novel’s very fabric. "He tried to remember how old he was, couldn’t." This is Billy the optometrist. "He tried to remember what year it was. He couldn’t remember that, either." For the traumatized soldier, the war is always present, and the present is always the war.
He is unstuck in time in the sense that he is stuck in time. His life is not linear, but radiates instead from a single event like the spokes of a wheel. Everything feels like a dream: a very bad dream. The novel is framed the way it is because Vonnegut, too, was traveling in time. He needed to make himself a part of the story because he already was a part of the story.
