Prelude to Metafiction

There is first mention of Kilgore Trout in this chapter, when Billy meets Rosewater after the war and finds that life is meaningless. In his desperation, Billy is offered to read one of Trout’s witty but lousy science fiction novels. It has come to my attention that Kilgore Trout seems to have a lot in common with the author Kurt Vonnegut, given he is also mentioned in this chapter as one of the sick American soldiers. With this first curious appearance was that I began to see the strange relationship between Vonnegut and Trout. Given we determined earlier in class that this book was something close to science fiction, and that in the first chapter, the narrator describes his book as a failure, I figured this character is meant to represent the author himself. And when this occurs, when something is referred back to itself, it is known as a metafiction.