As a member of the postmodern movement, Vonnegut explored new ways of storytelling through plot, form, and narration. In Cat’s Cradle, he brings fiction down to earth through his use of everyday vocabulary and simple prose. His stripped-down, basic sentences mark a break from his Modernist predecessors to create a story that is easily accessible and understandable to all readers.
Still, simple vocabulary may only partly compensate for the sheer strangeness of the novel’s characters and plot. Non sequiturs abound, as do moments of dry humor. Newt observes that “people weren’t [Dr. Hoenikker’s] specialty,” but only after recounting the scientist’s fascination with turtle head retraction and his obsessions with an old manuscript string. Non sequiturs spiral off into strange, tangential details. In that same letter, Newt muses about movies and then—just three sentences later—suicides:
After I finish this letter, I think I’ll go to a movie. Or if the sun comes out, maybe I’ll go for a walk though one of the gorges. Aren’t the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn’t get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.
The novel’s off-the-cuff quality lends it a comic yet devastating randomness. Philip Castle recounts the way his father bulldozed dead bodies into a mass grave while changing the toilet paper in John’s hotel room. Krebbs—the briefly mentioned lodger in John’s apartment—leaves behind a poem written in “excrement.” During his time with the bartender and Sandra, they bring up a discussion of “protein.” Like the plot itself, the story and its dialogue are haphazard, entropic.
Vonnegut turns Cat’s Cradle into a formal experiment, too. The novel excerpts passages from epitaphs, book indexes, and Bokonon verses to create a collage-like impression of source materials. It coins unfamiliar words, like karass and vin-dit, to initiate the reader into the paradoxes of Bokononism. And in living up to its titular game of string, the novel organizes itself into 127 chapters that each consist of a few pages—string-like fragments that the reader must piece together into coherence. Cat’s Cradle creates a reading experience that replicates the baffling, ridiculous messiness of the world itself.