I.

LITERATUR (9 p. + 1 p.)

Consider the following fragment from Kurt Vonneguts novel Slaughterhouse-Five:

Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.
Billy has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day. He has
walked through a door in 1955 and come out another one in 1941. He has gone back through that
door to find himself in 1963. He has seen his birth and death many times, he says, and pays
random visits to all the events in between.
He says.
Billy is spastic in time, has no control over where he is going next, and the trips
aren't necessarily fun. He is in a constant state of stage fright, he says, because he never knows
what part of his life he is going to have to act in next.
Billy was born in 1922 in Ilium, New York, the only child of a barber there. He was a funnylooking child who became a funny-looking youth-tall and weak, and shaped like a bottle of
Coca-Cola. He graduated from Ilium High School in the upper third of his class, and attended
night sessions at the Ilium School of Optometry for one semester before being drafted for
military service in the Second World War. His father died in a hunting accident during the war.
So it goes.
Billy saw service with the infantry in Europe, and was taken prisoner by the Germans.
After his honorable discharge from the Army in 1945, Billy again enrolled in the Ilium School
of Optometry. During his senior year there, he became engaged to the daughter of the founder
and owner of the school, and then suffered a mild nervous collapse.
A. Analyse the given fragment, pointing out the relationship between the character's name, his
identity and the way in which temporality is constructed. (4,5 p.)
B. Starting from your findings in response to question A, identify three characteristics of
postmodern fiction and discuss them with reference to the given fragment.(4,5 p.)
--------IV. Writing (9+ 1 points)
Read the text below.
1. Identify the predicament of dislocation that Santosh, the Indian immigrant in the U.S., is
going through. Discuss the differences in values and beliefs about freedom and home that the
two characters espouse. (2 paragraphs)
2. Starting from the above analysis write a short for and against essay on immigration and
belonging. Use your literary texts or films to give weight to your arguments. (2 paragraphs)

I told him about the hubschi [American] woman. I was hoping for some rebuke. A rebuke
would have meant that he was concerned for my honour, that I could lean on him, that rescue
was possible.
But he said, Santosh, you have no problems. Marry the hubshi. That will automatically make
you a citizen. Then you will be a free man.
I said, Sahib, I have a wife and children in the hills at home.
But this [Washington] is your home, Santosh. Wife and children in the hills, that is very nice
and that is always there. But that is over. You have to do what is best for you here. You are
alone here. Hubshi-ubshi, nobody worries about that here, if that is your choice. This isnt
Bombay. Nobody looks at you when you walk down the street. Nobody cares what you do.
He was right. I was a free man; I could do anything I wanted. I could, if it were possible for me
to turn back, go to the apartment and beg my old employer for forgiveness. I could, if it were
possible for me to become again what I once was, go to the police and say, I am an illegal
immigrant here. Please deport me to Bombay. I could run away, hang myself, surrender,
confess, hide. It didnt matter what I did, because I was alone. And I didnt know what I wanted
to do. It was like the time when my senses revive and I wanted to go out and enjoy and I found
there was nothing to enjoy. (One out of Many by V.S. Naipaul)
---------4. Writing.
Consider the following text:
It is sometimes said that the aim of the historian is to explain the past by finding, identifying,
or uncovering the stories that lie buried in chronicles; and that the difference between history
and fiction resides in the fact that the historian finds his stories, whereas the fiction writer
invents his. This conception of the historians task, however, obscures the extent to which
invention also plays a part in the historians operations. The same event can serve as a different
kind of element of many different historical stories, depending on the role it is assigned in a
specific characterization of the set to which it belongs. The death of the king may be a beginning,
an ending, or simply a transitional event in three different stories. In the chronicle, this event is
simply there as an element of a series; it does not function as a story element.
(Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe.)
Discuss various modes in which representations of reality are achieved by history and
fiction. You might wish to take the text above as a starting point for your composition.