research

Today for the first time I decided to look through the posts on this blog. I came across one post that expressed concern about "cheating" when looking up words that are unique to Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle. Yet, I was more shocked that we hadn't received prior warning about the terminology in this book that would be unfamiliar to us. Clearly we are all old enough to look up what a word means without the assistance of a teacher, but the experience reminded me of my reading of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. For those of you who have read this work, you know that much of the vocabulary is unique to the book, as the author created a new dialect that can kind of be described as a mix between English and Russian. Before reading this book for my senior year English class, our teacher advised us to look up a nadsat (the name of the dialect) dictionary. Me being lazy, I decided that this was unnecessary and that I could figure out the meaning of the unfamiliar words from the context. Well, I couldn't get through the first page without resorting to google to get a copy of the nadsat glossary.
While the unique language in A Clockwork Orange is much more extreme than that in Cat's Cradle, it makes one wonder, if the author is injecting words that he/she made up the definition for, how much of the language is up to us to interpret, and how much is the author shoving his/her point of view directly into your head without you having any say in how to process it? In a way, this is an act of the author manipulating your idea of the "truth" of the text.