- Copywork365
- Posts
- 20(ish)-MAY-2024 | Excerpt from “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
20(ish)-MAY-2024 | Excerpt from “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
Dan Bogachek
May 21, 2024
Excerpt from “Cat’s Cradle” by Kurt Vonnegut
There’s a certain… almost a detached disgust, the way each object get its own descriptor. So much about the narrator’s internal state and the outside environment is seen clearly in this one pattern.
“Sick”, “stiff”, “glossy”, “yellow”, “white-gloved”, “stop-and-go”, “garish”, irrelevant”, “glacier of”.
The result?
It’s one of those uncomfortable nauseous car rides in the rain through the city, with lots of traffic — and you get all of that without Vonnegut spelling it out for you. It’s all painted in.
My sick head wobbled on my stiff neck. The trolley tracks had caught the wheels of Dr. Breed’s glossy Lincoln again.
I asked Dr. Breed how many people were trying to reach the General Forge and Foundry Company by eight o’clock, and he told me thirty thousand.
Policemen in yellow raincapes were at every intersection, contradicting with their white-gloved hands what the stop-and-go signs said.
The stop-and-go signs, garish ghosts in the sleet, went through their irrelevant tomfoolery again and again, telling the glacier of automobiles what to do. Green meant go. Red meant stop. Orange meant change and caution.
