[labster]

Everything about it is funny. Humans are absurd, and Cat’s Cradle revels in the absurdity. It’s funny in the same way atom bombs are funny, that our species would hate itself so much as to make a weapon that could destroy us all, and like, we ignore it almost all of the time? Bokonon and the dictator becoming their roles is absurd, but aren’t people this absurd?

Also, there are a lot of chapters. Every single chapter break is there to let a punchline sink in. It’s a literary pause for laughter.

[awirth]

That's interesting, I've always reveled in the absurdity, but perhaps I'll re-read it with an eye to take each chapter in as a discrete unit. Thanks!

[labster]

Sometimes it’s a whole scene, but sometimes the only reason for a new chapter is comic timing. Or to shove more jokes in the chapter titles, of course. So I wouldn’t say they were discrete, as a break could come in the middle of a scene.

Seeing Vonnegut use chapter breaks for all sorts of purposes — dramatic, comic timing, scene breaks, suspense, etc — really encouraged me to use shorter chapters in some of my own writing, along with some of the techniques. Just like metadata is data, chapter breaks, line breaks, and white space are text. Of course the more you use it for tricks, the more you see the fourth wall, which might not match your tone — like all techniques there’s always a trade-off. More tonally serious works that use short chapters tend to avoid chapter titles, for instance.

[cm42]

Have you read Tim Dorsey at all?

His stuff is full of this type of humor, with notes of whatever decades of covering Florida Man stories for a Miami newspaper does to a man.

[labster]

I’d never even heard of him. But as a meteorologist, that main character of his sure sounds fun.