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Allusions
Dialect
Explanation and Analysis—Like Basque:
In addition to its use of the vernacular, Cat’s Cradle pays close attention to the spoken word. Vonnegut cuts literary language down to size, and he also tries replicating speech onto the page. Dialect signals the social status of characters, providing insight into education, class, or character that the novel’s minimal descriptions might lack. In the novel’s earliest chapters, dialect briefly mimes a lazy American ignorance. The older Ilium bartender, for instance, half-drunkenly slurs his words—“that’s a fugging shame”—when he recalls the day Dr. Hoenikker’s bomb dropped. Words matter but pronunciation does, too. Putting speech to paper, the novel parodies the kind of ignorant sloppiness that leads to strange conclusions about miraculous “protein” or magical science.
To a greater extent, this use of dialect dramatizes the cultural difference of a people. Some of the novel’s stylistic experiments come from its treatment of the San Lorenzan dialect, as John commits to paper the strangeness of its sounds. San Lorenzo’s dialect is “as incomprehensible as Basque,” and to the degree that it can only appear like gibberish: “Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store, Ko jy tsvantoor bat voo yore.” The verbal pronunciation is so different as to seem like a different language altogether.
This linguistic remove questions the possibility of inter-cultural exchange; it points to the linguistic quirks and cultural constructs that separate people. Swathed in Bokonon’s fictions, San Lorenzo could not seem any further removed from mainstream America. By emphasizing the impenetrable foreignness of the San Lorenzan dialect, Vonnegut demonstrates the difficulty of translating across different "cat's-cradles."
Related Themes:
