Truth and the Absurd

             

 

                “Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did” (Vonnegut 1). The use of this framing device as the opening for Cat’s Cradle serves as an example of Vonnegut’s use of metatextual absurdity as a form of revelation, a theme that spans many of his works. Early in Cat’s Cradle, the narrator draws attention to the text he is writing and its questionable veracity by saying “Nothing in this book is true” (Vonnegut, preface) and “Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it” (6). As was the case in Ambrose Bierce’s Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the audience is made aware of the text by the text. Throughout the rest of the book, the narrator continues to rely on this metatextual device, often with simple, absurdist quips. Stunning coincidences, surprising turns of events, even death and destruction are almost casually dismissed or given only passing mention. A man’s entire life, for example, is summed up with the phrase “He designed the hospital, married a native woman…fathered a perfect daughter, and died” (119). Vonnegut employs this strategy more obviously in Slaughterhouse Five, where the death of any character is always followed by the phrase “So it goes.” This strategy makes Vonnegut’s writing appear humorous, aloof to a point of quietism, even, but it serves a larger purpose. By drawing the attention of the audience out of the story by using this metatextuality, Vonnegut demonstrates that the way in which we frame or represent certain experiences is just as important as the experiences themselves due to the subjective nature of both truth and experience.

             Cat’s Cradle opens by framing the narrator with layers of false text, seemingly to no purpose. It hardly seems to matter whether the narrator is Jonah or John or even Sam, for as he remarks, “If I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still” (1). But by introducing himself as a character, a construct of the written word, the narrator draws our attention to the subjectivity of reality. He is Jonah because that is the way he has been framed and represented, so it is as much his ‘real’ name as John is. In his seminal work, Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut opens his novel by relating an argument he had with a friend when she learned he intended to write about his experiences in World War II. This friend accused Vonnegut: “You’ll pretend you were men instead of babies and you’ll be played in the movies by Frank Sinatra or John Wayne or some of those other glamorous, war-loving, dirty old men. And war will look just wonderful, so we’ll have a lot more of them” (Vonnegut 18). The way we frame our reality, the way we represent events, is just as important as the events themselves because truth is not the same for any two people. And by framing reality one way, it is then open for further manipulation and propagation. Far from being a quietist, Vonnegut draws his audience’s attention to that fact, often by framing his version of reality in a way that seems absurd, outlandish, or even laughable. By framing massive destruction with such metatextual, absurdist quips as “Feast your eyes” and “At last I had seen ice-nine,” Vonnegut demonstrates the power of suggestion and the influence it has in determining our attitudes towards the construct we call ‘reality’ (239). It is easy enough to laugh at the absurdity in Vonnegut’s work, but if we do nothing more than laugh, then we are failing to see that we have been manipulated into blithely accepting a version of reality that downplays true horrors and atrocities. By using the metatextual frame as a way to draw our attention away from the experience, Vonnegut reveals that, at the heart of the truth, everything can still be a lie.

Citations:

Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. Delta Fiction, Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Inc. 1963.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse Five. Rosetta Books LLC. 1969. 18.