Literature - Satirical Archetypes - Essay Example

During a time where emotions ran high and people chose sides with vehemence, the satirical element within both works serves as an archetype for the transcendent nature the War posed upon society at large. The social criticism, then, serves to illustrate the mundanity of a quiet life versus the extremity of international conflict and the social constructs that are destroyed when the incomprehensible occurs. Both Heller and Vonnegut are sardonic artists in their usage of satirical elements, penning the satire almost as an outside narrator, poised to enhance the words of the literal narrators with critique and sarcasm within the historical context of an international conflict.

The satirical element within Cat’s Cradle is the storytelling itself. From the narrator’s focus on writing a novel about what ‘important’ Americans were doing on the day that the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima to the fictional society that he travels to explore the secret formula for ice-nine, a compound that turns water into ice at room temperature. Even the literal use of the term ‘cat’s cradle’ penned as the title of the work is a satirical element founded on the narrator’s focus, a man called Felix Hoenikker, who was playing a game of cat’s cradle when the atom-bomb that he helped co-create is dropped.

The grand metaphor is highlighted by the simplistic and low-strategy game that is cat’s cradle where the main individual is trapped until the partner can create the desired shapes. Even this moment, the quiet game of cat’s cradle satirizes Felix’s position within the international conflict as an ‘important’ person during the Vietnam War. In Catch-22, Heller utilizes the shifting chronology of third person narration to define the timeline of events within a nation rocked by the events of World War II.

The phrase itself, ‘catch-22,’ is loosely defined as a problem that can never be solved because of inherent problems within the circumstance itself; a no-win situation. The narrator himself explains that catch-22 applies, for certain at least, in military conflicts where they are trapped within a form of circular logic wherein “there was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind” (Heller, 56).

The narrator goes on to comment that his companion was crazy to fly missions and absolutely insane if he didn’t, but “if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to” (56). To exist outside the rational would entail his protection, but to be of rational thought would indicate his essential purpose within the mission itself. This form of circular logic, the catch-22, is perhaps the largest utilization of satire within the novel itself. For, to define a conflict as one of circular logic, where the rational leads to the insane and back again without resolution, is to look upon the confines of current social mores and mock the attitudes of those who have no understanding of the international conflict at hand.

More, just as Cat’s Cradle utilizes the metaphor of the literal cat’s cradle to illustrate the juxtaposition of the mundanity of ‘