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Personification
Definition of Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians... read full definition
Satire
Explanation and Analysis—Science:
Scientific and technological triumphs weigh heavily upon the satire of Cat’s Cradle. Written during the start of the Cold War, Vonnegut grounds his novel in the supposed 20th-century emblems of progress—the atomic bomb or America’s military-industrial complex—and shows the patent absurdities within them. The work’s comic, incisive treatment of researchers and laymen alike throws a light upon the dangers of society’s overreliance on science.
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Satire
Explanation and Analysis—Granfalloons:
“Hoosiers do all right,” Hazel Crosby explains throughout the plane ride with irritating insistence. So begins Vonnegut’s mockery of granfalloonery and his novel’s satire of group identification. Granfalloons—“a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done”—is both a problematic conceit and a pathetic one. Hazel obsesses over allegiance to the Hoosier state, spinning together a flimsy cohort that spans from John to Abe Lincoln. She takes comfort in San Lorenzo’s Christian bent and its adoption of the English language, allying herself to the island on the basis of language and religion. Free-market-adhering, anti-Communist, and aggressively prejudiced, the Crosby couple represents precisely the kind of egotistical American chauvinism that Vonnegut rejects.
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Satire
Explanation and Analysis—Colonialism:
The trope of the third-world colonial territory takes on new force in Vonnegut’s comically exaggerated portrayal of San Lorenzo. Through its satire of the absurdly hopeless island, Cat’s Cradle points to the injustices of colonialism and foreign intervention.
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Chapter 78. Ring of Steel
Explanation and Analysis—Bokononism:
Cat’s Cradle subjects Bokononism—and religion at large—to a satire of contradictory, mind-boggling ironies. Through interspersed chapters and digressions, John relates the Bokononist tenets to the reader. The portrait that follows is puzzling, absurd, and comic. In what seems to be a feat of cognitive gymnastics, Bokononism is aware of its own foma as it preaches to the masses. The people who practice the religion—that is, all San Lorenzans—manage to recognize its consistencies and nonetheless embrace its doctrines. Bokononism presents an extreme caricature of religion by reveling in its own incompatible lies.
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