Aspects of Minor Literature in Kurt Vonnegut’s Sirens of Titan, Slapstick, or Lonesome No More! and Cat's Cradle

Abstract

The works of American author Kurt Vonnegut are a self-conscious science fiction that attract attention to the untruthful discourses building the modern world. His novels Slapstick, or Lonesome no More!, Cat’s Cradle, and Sirens of Titan are scientific dystopias that depict helpless individuals who feel subjugated by their cultures. They belong to discourses that do not represent them and suffer self-delusion and lack of love as they try to find meaning. His characters make his works into a minority literature, based on the model of French philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their book Kafka, Toward a Minor Literature. The model that is based on three main aspects which are: Language deterritorialization, politicization, and collective value, is embodied in Vonnegut’s three works through techniques like estrangement and transgression in the dystopian science fiction text, social judgement, political despotism, the power of science, and finally experimental writing techniques like metafiction, language defamiliarization, the invention of a new language to highlight the language deterritorialization and transgression