Slaughterhouse - Five Literary Term: Analepsis

Analepsis

• Def.- insertion of an image in a narrative scene that suggests that something occured in the past, or a flashback
• Ex.- pg. 59, "He was stopped by a signal in the middle of Ilium's black ghetto. The people who lived here hated it so much that they burned down a lot of it a month before. It was all they had, and they'd wrecked it. The neighborhood reminded Billy of some of the towns he had seen in the war... It looked like Dresden after it was fire-bombed- like the surface of the moon."
• C.- Billy is driving through a part of the town that was destroyed by a black race riot, and is reminded of the devastation in Dresden.
• C.- The analepsis of Billy's experience in Dresden and his glimpse of the results of the race riot combined with his comparison of the two events
• C.- reveal both the theme of the destructiveness of war, whether it be a declared war like WWII or riots, and Vonnegut's distaste for the unnecessary violence of humankind.