Cat's Cradle

Metafiction is a genre or style of narrative fiction that draws attention to its own nature as a textual artifact, allowing the author to push back against narrative conventions and examine the role of literature in a character’s life. Though metafictional elements can be traced back to such early works as Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, completed in 1400, the genre surged during the postmodern era, as authors became increasingly interested in theoretical issues related to constructed meaning in texts. Examples from this era include Jorge Luis Borge’s Ficciones, John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49.

Among Vonnegut’s works Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five, published in 1969, contain notable metafictional elements. In Slaughterhouse-Five, the novel’s narrator is a recurring minor character who explicitly discusses his reasons for writing the novel. Similarly, in Cat’s Cradle, the narrator discusses the events that led him to write. From the first chapter, John separates his present, Bokononist self from his younger, Christian self. He also frequently interrupts the narrative with asides about things that his character could not have known at the time, especially as he emphasizes the significance of ice-nine. At the novel’s climax, John’s decision to place his writings at the top of Mount McCabe illustrates their symbolic potency within the novel’s imagined world, hinting at their similar disruptive potential for readers. More than an incidental feature of the text, Vonnegut’s use of metafiction supports his overall satirical approach, as John’s ahistorical text provides darkly comic commentary on the real world it lampoons.