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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.
In prying apart modernity’s obsession with scientific progress, Cat’s Cradle reveals the gap between science’s pace of progress and human stupidity instead. Research may have advanced, but human intellects have not. Even at Ilium, headquarters of the General Forge and Foundry’s Research Laboratory, ignorance reigns supreme. During John’s night out, Sandra and the bartender celebrate “protein” as the secret of life. Ms. Pefko more than happily dismisses Dr. Horvath’s research as “magic,” while Dr. Breed keeps hordes of female secretaries underground. Scientific knowledge and progress—if there is any—marches in lockstep with the growing ranks of the brainless and banal.
No one seems to embody these failings more acutely than the Hoenikker family. Dr. Hoenikker, the genius scientist and “father” of the atomic bomb, is oblivious to his own children. He wonders about how turtles retract their heads as Angela struggles to work the car engine, plays with cheap dollar toys in his office, and tips his wife for breakfast. When confronted with the destruction wreaked by his atomic bomb, he does not even recognize the meaning of “sin.” Dr. Hoenikker’s “children” are no better. After the scientist dies from his own invented ice-nine, Angela, Newt, and Frank divide the crystals among themselves and trade these potentially world-ending devices for marriage, foreign positions, or steamy affairs. Cat’s Cradle satirizes this stunted and stupid bunch, showing how the Hoenikkers’ failure to recognize sin may well be a sin in itself.
More foolish than science’s inherent stupidity, though, is the world’s willingness to trade for it. A chorus of characters, like Dr. Breed or the Crosbys, proselytize science over superstition. Meanwhile, Papa Monzano’s belief that “science is the strongest thing there is” arguably sets off the novel’s most devastating plot point. Having received Felix Hoenikker’s ice-nine sample, the dictator touches the scientific marvel as he nears his death, causes all of San Lorenzo to turn into solid, and inaugurates an apocalypse. The “magic that works” ironically brings the world to an end. The satirical plot suggests that, devoid of morals or culture, science can only destroy.
Related Themes:
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.
Vonnegut sketches San Lorenzo with a cynically broad brush. John explains how the equatorial island was the runt of every colonial enterprise stretching as far back as the Spaniards. Its people are “oatmeal colored” and “thin,” infrastructure is lacking, and a dictator lords over the place while a desperate tourist industry tries to conceal all the corruption and ruin. “The squalor and misery of the city […] were impossible to see,” John notes from the view of his hotel room. The island bears all the markings of a pathetically deprived colonial society, outfitted with a history and present reality that border on the cliché.
The island is nowhere more pathetic than in the contrasts between Papa Monzano’s grand aspirations and the abject state of his people, the glorious national ideologies and the lived realities. Despotism and foreign intervention still thrive even after colonialism has drawn its last breaths. The “fat” dictator—practically melting in “lard”—cruises up to the airport reception as his emaciated citizens sing limp praise of their glorious republic. The Crosbys applaud the “Christian Nation” and its resemblance to American democracy, willfully oblivious to the poverty around them. For all its appearances, San Lorenzo is not democratic, advanced, or American in the slightest. The island suffered at the hands of western colonists and continues to do so through Crosbys and Monzanos, who ignore the suffering before them and keep the island in poverty. Vonnegut’s brutal caricature shows how San Lorenzo owes its sorry state to the failings of lofty, top-down agendas and meddlesome foreign interests.
Related Themes:
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.
The Crosbys' dependence on granfalloons only speaks to its failings. Cat’s Cradle shows how the temptations of tribalism and ideology can blind people to crucial differences and nuance. As it happens, San Lorenzo—supposedly Christian and English-speaking—turns out to be neither. In fact, the island’s people could not be any more different from the Crosbys. They speak in barely comprehensible dialect, live in degraded poverty under a dictatorship, and practice Bokononism in secret. Hazel Crosby insists upon shared affinities that do not actually exist.
But this pathetic search for belonging and identification outlasts even the island’s destruction. After ice-nine devastates the island, Frank paints San Lorenzo’s lone taxi with “white stars” and “U.S.A.” Hazel stitches an American flag with the “six-pointed stars of David” and the wrong colors, a comic muddle that probably desecrates the political symbols rather than honoring them. In the wake of apocalypse, the survivors still hold fast to their deceptively superficial groupings and associations. Cat’s Cradle attacks the inherently artificial group identities that sanction feelings of otherness, hubris, ignorance, and insularity.
Related Themes:
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.
The history of Bokononism’s founding takes this deliberately senseless theology a step still further. Religion becomes even more of a charade as the novel adds another two-fold irony to Bokonon’s creation. In Chapter 78, Julian Castle explains the scarcely imaginable circumstances behind Bokononist belief:
Well, when it became evident that no governmental or economic reform was going to make the people much less miserable, the religion became the one real instrument of hope. Truth was the enemy of the people, because the truth was so terrible, so Bokonon made it his business to provide the people with better and better lies.
Realizing that truth is miserable, Bokonon makes a stunning leap of logic by choosing to create "better lies." His supposed pursuit of utopia and higher truth ironically creates a hell veiled by comforting fictions and happy ignorance instead. Bokononism is so farcically ironic that it even tries to undermine itself. Hoping to increase its popular appeal, Bokonon voluntarily persecutes himself to add more “zest” and “tang” to the religion. The people of San Lorenzo promise to hook the prophet at the same time that they practice his teachings.
Bokononism seems almost too self-aware for its own good. The novel satirizes religion’s failings through the laughable, ironic, and unthinkable reality that underlies Bokononism’s guise of truth. Through Bokononism, Vonnegut suggests that religion may be nothing more than a series of whimsical constructs, a hollow “cat’s cradle” of cruel self-inventions.
Related Themes:
