Who is I?

The first chapter of the book Slaughterhouse Five, was a very peculiar way to start a novel, consisting of several incomplete and confusing ideas. It is told in the first person, but very little assumptions can be made about the narrator. He always refers to himself as “I”, but never mentions any name. At this point, there are only two guesses of whom this mysterious speaker could be: a character, or the author himself. In an attempt to eliminate one of these two options, I made a brief research on the biography of Kurt Vonnegut. Turns out that he did experience practically all of the events that the book`s narrator went through, including the participation in World War II as a soldier and a prisoner (in Dresden), the witnessing of the fire bombing in Dresden, and the mere fact that both of them are writers. Although these connections do favor the idea that the narrator is Kurt Vonnegut, the possibility always exists that the events in the author `s life were simply an inspiration for writing the book. Despite it all we can definitely state that Slaughterhouse Five was written on a very personal level, and was written upon several of Vonnegut`s life experiences.