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Get every literary device explanation for Cat’s CradlePlus so much more...
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Allusion
Explanation and Analysis—The Brobdingnagians:
Just as luck would have it, John meets Newt during his plane ride bound for San Lorenzo in Chapter 51. Their meeting makes for a remarkable stroke of both coincidence and allusion:
Newt was a very tiny young man indeed, though not grotesque. He was as nicely scaled as Gulliver among the Brobdingnagians, and as shrewdly watchful, too.
John’s simile takes a page from Gulliver’s Travels, a famous work of satire in which the titular protagonist visits distant lands and all their strange people. Gulliver—the story’s shipwrecked captain—gets mixed up among giants, dwarfs, magicians, and immortals. In this instance, Cat’s Cradle gives a sense for Newt’s size by imagining him in the company of Gulliver’s giant Brobdingnagians.
By paying humorous tribute to Jonathan Swift—a satirical “giant” himself—John tags Gulliver’s Travels as a fitting counterpart to the novel. If the errant voyager meets a dizzying cast of people and practices, the journalist-turned-president finds himself in company that is no less unusual. The San Lorenzans embrace Bokononism for its lies and practice intimacy by rubbing their feet together. Frank, Newt, and Angela gladly hand foreign actors the tools for global destruction. Papa Monzano lords over starving masses in a Gothic castle. Cat’s Cradle shares with its 18th-century satirical twin the same emphasis on journeys and strange people.
John adds a twist to Swift, though. Gulliver comes to appreciate the Houyhnhnms, the fictional horse people who receive him on the last leg of his journey. Finding his hosts to be more decent than humans, the captain even returns home with reluctance. Gulliver’s journey opens his mind and shows him humanity’s own flaws. But in John’s case, his hosts merely destroy the world. Papa Monzano, the Hoenikkers, and the Crosbys deal a defeating gut-punch of stupidity more than anything close to dignity. Swift broadens Gulliver’s horizons, but Vonnegut ends John’s instead.
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