The Motif of Predestination in the Novel "Slaughterhouse-Five" by Kurt Vonnegut

American literature and culture has its roots, among other things, in the religious views of the early settlers, so that many themes and motifs important to Christianity are touched upon and reinterpreted by writers in their contemporary realities. Such national motifs often reflect the core foundations of culture, the systematic analysis of which in diachrony is one of the important problems and represents the scientific novelty of this study. The subject of this study is the peculiarities of the realization of the predestination motif in Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Slaughterhouse-Five", or, "The Children's Crusade" (1969). The American writer considers predestination as an attitude to time and life philosophy and tries to reveal the relevance of such a vision of fate of people within the context of consumer society after the Second World War. The aim of the article is to reveal, through the analysis of character images, symbols and allusions, the essence of the predestination motif in the novel "Slaughterhouse-Five". The methodology includes a complex combination of comparative-historical, cultural-historical, structural and biographical methods with elements of motive analysis and psychological approach. The images of robot aliens from the planet Tralfamador and Billy Pilgrim, who had a traumatic experience in the war, are the expression of this motif. As a result, the researcher concludes that the characters' belief in predestination and in the fact that nothing can be changed allows to a certain extent to ignore the negative emotions that stimulate uncontrolled travel through the time loop of memories, but cannot get rid of them completely. At the same time, avoidance as a defense mechanism of the psyche keeps one from being involved in one's life and allows cruelty to occur. К. Vonnegut does not agree with this approach and proposes to return to the present moment and set the boundaries of what is possible to change and what is not, relying on humanistic values.

motif, predestination, trauma, PTSD, war, agency, memory, avoidance, postmodernism, time