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Style
Definition of Tone
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical, and so on. For instance... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical or mournful, praising or critical... read full definition
The tone of a piece of writing is its general character or attitude, which might be cheerful or depressive, sarcastic or sincere, comical... read full definition
Chapter 10. Secret Agent X-9
Explanation and Analysis:
John’s tone often sees to totter between pure exhaustion and sarcastic humor. At times, his brief, simple narration smacks of anticlimax. “It was low and black and cruel,” he writes of Papa Monzano’s castle. Or of the drive to Frank’s home in San Lorenzo: “the air grew cooler. There was mist.” At times, John’s inexpressiveness creates a feeling of deflation.
But Cat’s Cradle also owes much of its comic appeal to this same straight-faced narrative style. Wry and deadpan, John’s narration tends towards understatement to create dry humor. He builds a comedy through contrasts, drawing upon the distance between his monotone and the novel’s own unthinkable eccentricities to underscore his world’s ridiculousness. At the bar in Ilium, for instance, he recounts a conversation with Sandra and the bartender:
We talked about Frank Hoenikker, and we talked about the old man, and we talked a little about Asa Breed, and we talked about the General Forge and Foundry Company, and we talked about the Pope and birth control, about Hitler and the Jews. We talked about phonies.
John hardly bats an eye at the oddly far-ranging subject matters that span Dr. Asa Breed and “Hitler and the Jews.” Nor does he blink at the Hoenikkers' strange family dynamics, Claire Minton’s ability to read character from book indexes, the Crosbys' American insularity, or the strangeness of San Lorenzo’s habit of persecuting and practicing Bokononism. John’s matter-of-fact acceptance of these apparent absurdities merely ends up drawing the reader’s attention to them. He emphasizes them through his appearance of disinterest. By underplaying the absurdities of San Lorenzo, the Crosbys, and the Hoenikkers, John dramatizes the preposterous, nonsensical quality of his world.
Related Themes:
