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Definition of Verbal Irony
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging outside and someone remarks "what... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean. When there's a hurricane raging... read full definition
Verbal irony occurs when the literal meaning of what someone says is different from—and often opposite to—what they actually mean... read full definition
Chapter 75. Give My Regards to Albert Schweitzer
Explanation and Analysis—Saint, I Think:
John’s hyperbolic account presents Julian Castle as a man of wild contrasts. On one page, he associates the American sugar millionaire with the likes of “Tommy Manville, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Barbara Hutton.” Castle’s “selfish phase” involves “lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion.” Having established a hospital in San Lorenzo, though, he is now the epitome of virtue:
And then Angela Hoenikker Conners, Newt’s beanpole sister, came in with Julian Castle, father of Philip, and founder of the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle. Castle wore a baggy white linen suit and a string tie. He had a scraggly mustache. He was bald. He was scrawny. He was a saint, I think.
John’s hyperbole arguably spills over into verbal irony. The selfish, Hitler-esque debauch has become a “saint,” pulling off a transformation so impossible that it comes across as downright comic. The novel’s humorous observation reinforces its baffling moral calculus, in which good deeds can somehow compensate for past atrocities. Like the sugar billionaire, Dr. von Koenigswald—the Auschwitz camp physician—is on track to save as many lives as he killed by 3010. Vonnegut satirically criticizes the cheap repentance practiced by the novel’s characters.
Julian Castle’s sainthood problematizes the cheapening of humanity. In Cat’s Cradle, society heaps sanctity and praise while simultaneously falling out of touch with more genuine forms of human feeling. It detonates bombs and praises its inventors. It dismisses brutal suffering with a wave of performative penance. The novel’s commentary reveals a world that is willing to worship everything, follow anything—freak scientists, atomic bombs, lazy presidents, and self-persecuting prophets included. In this shallow world, everyone is a saint, martyr, or prophet. And that means no one is actually any good.
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