Satire, Surrealism and Dark Humor in Vonneguts Cats Cradle :: Vonnegut Cats Cradle

Satire, Surrealism and Dark Humor in Vonneguts Cats CradleAnd in that location on the shaft in letters six inches high, so serving me God, was the wordMother (48) If thats mother, said the driver, what in hell could they have embossed over father? As the reader soon finds out, 40 cm of marble, as directed by Felix Hoenikkers will, that says FATHER (49). Vonnegut stops you short and plucks at your hand like a little boy who has just neaten the cat and cant wait to show you what hes d cardinal you cant, as a trustworthy adult, laugh at the absurdity of the bald and shivering feline because you inhabit that you should be astonished, offended, annoyed, anything but burst out laughing, which you desperately desire to do. Vonnegut acts as Wrang-Wrang in this scene two men in an ice storm, marveling at a towering alabaster penis given in memoriam to a mother by her children. Vonneguts use of the surreal (and, by the way, this is also an installation of, if not dark, then very twisted humor) in the scene discourages the readers examination so that Vonnegut can slip his point across without notice. What point? Possibly, and this could be just me thinking aloud, the scene describes the strength of the mother and the dual roles she had to butterfly the father was also a child, as simple and pure in his intellectual ecstasy as, well, a marble cube. The marker was an alabaster appendage twenty feet high and three feet thick (48), Vonnegut crows, inviting you to stand in the common cold with him and wonder with the driver exactly what in hell is going onSatire is thrown into CC early and often, so much that it listenms just about unfairly easy to extract examples, but it is such an integral component of the novel that it requires at least a look-see. One of my favorite split of the book is the scene on the airplane where Jonah meets not one but two stereotypical Ugly Americans, a term coined by William J. Lederer and Eugene Burdick in the title of their 1958 no vel of the same name. The Mintons argon well educated, oratory six or seven (65) languages between the two of them but see the people and places they have seen during their diplomatic careers as About the same (65). They are what Bokonon calls a duprass that will, as Jonah points out, die at very tight the same time when the world is overcome by ice-nine.