Satire, and Black Humor in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut was written in 1963. "It is a satirical commentary on modern man and his madness" (back cover). It is a book that counters almost every aspect of our society. As well as satire, Vonnegut also includes apocalyptic elements in this novel.
Satire, "the use of irony, sarcasm, or ridicule in exposing, denouncing, or deriding vice or folly" (Webster 1193), is very prevalent in Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut hits on many aspects of human life with this satire. Government, religion, medicine, and business are just a few of these aspects. In focusing on government, Vonnegut shows us a leader ("Papa" Monzano), who attempts to create a utopia, but just like in today's society, he makes promises to his people, and then fails to fulfill them. Ironically he allows the best for himself and his staff, while his people struggle. As well, Vonnegut attacks religion with his own creatively made up religion (Bokononism) which is nothing but lies. He shows religion and science to be contradictory where religion is based ...
Kurt Vonnegut said in The Vonnegut Statement (1973), in an interview with Robert Scholes, that one of his reasons for writing is "to poison minds with humanity…to encourage them to make a better world" (107). This idea works quite well in Vonnegut's book, Cat's Cradle. It is a satirical story of a man's quest to write a book about the day the world ended (refering to the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima), which he never finishes. What we get is a raw look at humans trying desperately to find a sense of purpose in their lives through different means such as religion, science, etc.
Comedy and Satire are two very common, yet different genres used in literature. Comedy is most commonly used to be humorous and amusing, whereas, satire is usually defined as a piece of work intended to criticize serious topics or problems going on in the real world. Ken Kesey, the author of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest very specifically chose to incorporate these two genres to push his own beliefs. In the 1950’s, younger generations of America’s population began to question conformity and the ethics of institutions like the one Kesey wrote about in Cuckoo’s Nest. Like many others in this younger generation, Kesey was considered a hippie and part of many counter-culture groups going against the government. Ken Kesey’s novel One Flew Over
Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is a satire on the state of world affairs in the 1960's. Vonnegut made a commentary in this book on the tendency of humans to be warlike, belligerent, and shortsighted. The main character of the book, the narrator, is certainly not a protagonist, although the modern reader craves a hero in every story and the narrator in this one is the most likely candidate. Through the narrator's eyes, Vonnegut created a story of black humor ending in the destruction of the earth.
Oscar Wilde, an acclaimed Irish Poet, novelist, dramatist and critic once aptly commented, “Men become old, but they never become good”. The philosophical aspect of this quote relies on the basis that human beings are inherently malevolent. Through his pessimistic perspective, Wilde clearly captures the ill-disposed mindset of mankind. Moreover, there are various deductive arguments that discredit the optimistic depiction of human nature. One of the prime examples can be found in Kurt Vonnegut’s literature. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat's Cradle, through the illustration of his characters, the author symbolizes the four elements of human fallibility.
An example of satire that Kurt Vonnegut uses is when he designs the government of San Lorenzo. San Lorenzo is a small island somewhere in the Caribbean. The people in San Lorenzo are doomed to failure no matter what leader they have, and they have always been this way. San Lorenzo, in the novel, is pictured as one of the most unsuccessful and useless places on earth. The people there are very poor, do not have much to eat, and do not have any motivation left at all, "Johnson and McCabe had failed to raise the people from the misery and muck" (Scholes 133). Thus, that is why they do not care anymore who there leader is going to be, because they know that they are going to fail anyway, "Everybody was bound to fail, for San Lorenzo was as unproductive as an equal area i...
Satire is a technique used in literature to criticize the faults of society. An excellent examle of contemporary satire is Kurt Vonnegut's novel God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. The author tells the life of Eliot Rosewater, a young and affluent man troubled by the plights of the poor. Eliot is the President of the Rosewater Foundation, a sum of money worth approximately $87 million. Using this position, he does everything he can to help the poor. This charity giving is socially unacceptable to the wealthy, particularly Eliot's father Senator Lister Ames Rosewater. Vonnegut uses caricature, irony, and tone to satirize the lack of care the rich have for those socially "beneath them."
Kurt Vonnegut uses a combination of dark humor and irony in Slaughterhouse-Five. As a result, the novel enables the reader to realize the horrors of war while simultaneously laughing at some of the absurd situations it can generate. Mostly, Vonnegut wants the reader to recognize the fact that one has to accept things as they happen because no one can change the inevitable.
...ther, and nearly kills an innocent woman. In a broader perspective, conformity can leave people walking aimlessly down the beaten path with no real direction except conformity, doomed to live yet another meaningless life in a society based on archaic principles.
“Kurt Vonnegut is a writer whose works, when read closely, ultimately warn against the dangerous ideas that exist within science fiction,” (Simpson, 262). Kurt Vonnegut is an eccentric writer who uses his medium, and dark sense of humour to construct meaning that transcends far beyond just the plot. In Breakfast of Champions Vonnegut creates a satirical novel, that revolves around the meeting of two main characters and the journey that leads up to their encounter. The first character, Kilgore Trout, is an old cynical science fiction writer who lives by himself with his pet parakeet in New York. Despite writing countless novels and short stories he remains unknown to the general population. One of his only readers Eliot Rosewater, a wealthy
...is reducing food intake. When the young gymnasts restrict their diet, they do not realize how they are harming their body and how much danger they are putting it in. http://www.examiner.com/article/osteopenia-eating-disorders-and-teens also says, that once you have lowered your bone mineral density there in no way that you can get it back. This means that when you are classified with osteoporosis, you will always have it and there is no way that you can go back to having strong bone mineral density, and your body will be prone to fractures for the rest of your life. This disease makes your body very weak and fragile, which is opposite from a gymnasts ultimate goal of having a muscular and strong body. Overall, the “Female Athlete Triad” is a very serious condition, and it puts gymnasts bodies in a great amount of danger for injuries, or later in life complications.
"Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." John F. Kennedy. When we permit ourselves to comply with what our acquaintances, family or public opinion asks of us, we lose the capability to develop into our own person. Conformity, then again, is more than simply the young lady wearing UGG Boots and an Abercrombie hoodie to fit in. It is all the more then just lis...
I have learned that the Ku Klux Klan was in response to the Southern bitterness towards blacks having won freedom from slavery in the aftermath of the civil war. Congress had passed the Reconstruction Acts which divided the South into 5 military districts, each under a general. New elections were to be held in each state with freed, black, male slaves being allowed to vote; this infuriated Southerners. The first branch of the Ku Klux Klan was founded in Pulaski, Tennessee, around 1865, the name Ku Klux comes from the Greek word, Kuklose, meaning circle. The Klan was a secret organization founded by 6 ex-confederate veterans, they considered the Klan to be a secret social club, not knowing what a violent organization it would turn into. They decided to make their Klan costumes as odd as possible. Klan members would be dressed in white sheets and their faces would be covered with white masks. These ex-soldiers would ride through the town, make jokes and act silly, this made former black slaves to believe that the ghosts of the Confederate dead had risen to reclaim their land. Many Southerners began to join the Klan and harm former black slaves. Soon these night rides turned into violent night rides and lynching’s. Once the Klan began to make a name for itself, General Nathan Bedford Forrest, the famous cavalry leader, became the leader of this invisible empire. The Klan was effective in keeping blacks away from the voting polls. The Klan was coming under increased attack by Congress and the Reconstruction state governments. The leaders of the Klan realized that the Klan’s end was near as an organized force.
Even though Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb screened in the midst of the sobering Cold War, critics were keen on praising the film for its mastery of humor applied to such a sensitive matter. The film is exceedingly loaded with metaphors, innuendos, and allusions that nothing can be left undissected or taken for face value; the resulting effect is understood to be part of Kubrick’s multifarious theme. Kubrick has stated that what began as a “the basis for a serious film about accidental war ” eventually birthed an absurd and farcical classic comedy. The director fuses together irony, satire, and black humor to create a waggish piece but most of all the situation of the times and its gravity is the essence of what the audience finds so hilarious . Using caricatures rather than characters, exaggerated script, and sexual undertones, Kubrick manifests to the audience their own predicament and just how ridiculous it is to even consider brinksmanship as a means to preserve the American lifestyle.
Though conformity is a humane feeling, many examples of conformity going wrong can be found throughout history. For example, multiple Germans conformed to follow Nazism and prosecuted millions of innocent Jews. Southern whites conformed to segregate thousands of African-Americans. By looking at multiple sources of literature, one can see conformity becomes unacceptable when innocent people are hurt and/or killed and affects the way one thinks or acts.
As humans, we interact with the world around us in five main discernible ways: seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, and smelling. Appropriately, they are known together as the five senses, five clearly distinguishable ways we could familiarize ourselves with an environment or recognize a new situation which we have not encountered before. As discussed in class, they help the brain perceive the world around us in a way where we can understand and react to everything which is happening around us. It is not just humans who have these abilities either, as almost all animals rely on at least one sharpened sense to help them avoid danger on a day to day basis and survive in whatever environment they live in. While none of our sensory abilities may be the strongest ones individually compared to certain ones in certain other animals, what makes humans unique as a species is that we possess an ability to input the information all of