Nothing is more apparent in the genre of satire than the ridicule of the vices and immoralities of society. This focussing on the defects of society as a whole doubles as a function of this genre of literature and a framework within the plot or theme of the novel or story. The satirist emphasizes the ugly ramifications of society, but to do so the satirist needs a vehicle for the observation of society’s actions and effects as a whole. This society is often represented as a microcosm or series of microcosms along a journey and the vehicle for the observation of the presented society is an individual located on the outside. To ensure that the individual is fully isolated from society and thus capable of objectively observing the follies of the world, the individual is given characteristics of a distinctive identity. The concept of an individual may be summarized in a statement made by Rick Hoyle: “The human self is a self-organizing, interactive system of thoughts, feelings, and motives that characterizes an individual. The self is reflexive and dynamic in nature: responsive yet stable” (Hoyle 2). Therefore, the outsider must be an individual, fully capable of organizing his or her thoughts and emotions and the consequences of each upon the self and the world. Logically proceeding the definition of the individual outside of society is the definition of society; a term that “can be used to designate the specifically relational system of interaction among individuals and collectivities” (Sanford 219). By positioning the polarities of individual and society in a conflict of values the satirist has created an effective method for criticizing society. The major trends the satirist may attribute to the individuals separated from society are the inability to integrate themselves into society, a certain degree of naiveté, and have definite flaws. These trends are apparent in the protagonists of the satiric novels: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle.
Mark Twain’s satirical novel Huckleberry Finn has a main protagonist that is a precocious boy named Huckleberry Finn. Huck Finn’s initiation into society and society’s values is at Miss Watson and the widow’s home after his father’s death presents the civilized part of the society that Huck has not been exposed to before. It aggregates Huck’s education both as an individual and as a part of society up to the time when he sets out on a raft to Jackson’s Island; and his acceptance of Jim begins his exclusion from society. Huck Finn is forced from the nineteenth-century society, which he lives in; his estrangement is initiated when he fakes his murder to escape from his abusive father and sets off downstream. The only time that Huck has a true sense of freedom is when he is on the raft with Jim, heading down to the Mississippi. Hut his view of the stupidities of society is magnified and his sense of freedom is lost when he is thrown into society once again.
When Huck stumbles upon the Grangerford family under the assumed name George Jackson, he is exposed to a higher level of society than he has ever seen. Upon first meeting the Grangerfords and seeing their house, Huck states: “It was a might nice family, and a might nice house, too. I hadn’t seen no house out in the country before that was so nice and had so much style” (Twain 120). The family is well mannered and civilized, the father, Col Grangerford a gentleman and kind. Huck is given new clothes, a servant to follow him around, and attends church every Sunday. However, Huck attends church but feels that it “was pretty ornery preaching—all about brotherly love, and such like tiredness” (Twain 131). But when Huck is faced with the violence of the feud between the Grangerfords and the Sheperdson’s he is horrified and disgusted at the pointlessness at the cruelty and violence of the feud between the two-aristocratic families. The two brothers and the father of the Grangerford family are killed and Huck witnesses the brutal shooting of his friend Buck and his cousin Joe. Huck gives an account of his feelings after witnessing the murder:
It made me so sick… I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them. (Twain 137)
The horror of this sight stays with Huck, and he does not feel his freedom from that side society until he is back on the raft with Jim, floating away from the violence that horrified him. Huck states: “I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all” (Twain 138). Mark Twain effectively used Huck in the world of the Grangerfords to show the senselessness of family feuds and the senseless violence that even well bred men are capable of inflicting.
In Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain has created a character that has a degree of naiveté and innocence. Despite Huck’s audacity and brazen curiosity about his surroundings, the fact that he is indeed still a young adult is a point to consider when viewing Huck as the vehicle for the satiric viewpoint. Huck Finn, in spite of his unconventional childhood, has a lack of experience that comes with years. His naiveté is most apparent when he is at the circus in the “little one-horse town in a big bend” (Twain 160). Huck declares that it:
was a real bully circus. It was the splendidest sight that ever was…every lady with a lovely complexion, and perfectly beautiful, and looking just like a gang of real sure-enough queens, and dressed in clothes that cost millions of dollars and just littered with diamonds. It was a powerful fine sight; I never see anything so lovely (Twain 171).
When a circus performer pretended to be a drunken man from the audience and stumbled into the ring, Huck is fooled along with the crowd into believing what was only a regular part of the circus act. He admits that “ I felt sheepish enough, to be took in so, but wouldn’t a been in that ring-master’s place, not for a thousand dollars” (Twain 173). Even after the trick, Huck is convinced it was a one-time performance and still considers the circus “bully”. Mark Twain has placed Huck in a position where he is representative of the gullibility of the average man. It was not just Huck who was tricked at the circus; the entire crowd was astonished and amazed.
Mark Twain also instilled Huck with flawed characteristics, which are used as a trend by the satirist to convincingly portray an outsider from society. If the protagonist is a flawless, knowledgeable and perfect individual, the readers would not relate and identify to him and a large part of the function of satire would be lost. If flaws in the protagonist signify an individual outside society, then Huck Finn is very much isolated. Ever since he walked into Tom Sawyer swinging a dead cat, Huck Finn has been immortalized as a rapscallion and a scoundrel. His flaws are more pronounced at the beginning of the novel, and though they never disappear, are somewhat alleviated by the time of the novel’s conclusion. Huck has a tendency to put on many different identities; at few times in the book is Huck actually Huck. When staying with the Grangerford’s he is George Jackson, with Mary Ann’s family, he is Joe, and English servant to Reverend Blodgett, and to the lady in St. Petersburg he is first Sarah Mary Williams and then George Peters. While staying with the Phelps, he was posing as Tom Sawyer. One literary critic explained that “Huck assumes either voluntarily or through external pressure ten different identities during his progress down river, inventing elaborate and excessively lugubrious family history for himself” (Strickland 52). The almost uncanny ability of Huck to take on another personality is astonishing, as is his ability to lie on when put on the spot. Curiously enough, each time he creates a new role, it adds up that “death, illness, or destruction of the family are involved in seven of the ten roles” throughout the novel (Strickland 50). Twain’s Huck Finn is so isolated from society and a family that he can, through these roles, convince someone that he has escaped from a violent past and thus gain sympathy and aid. Mark Twain, as a satirist, created an isolated character with both innocence and flaws. Huck gazes in on a cruel, sad society that is capable of killing, enslaving human beings and twisting people’s emotions.
The novel Catch 22 by Joseph Heller was published in 1961 and is a strong satirical novel. The main protagonist is an Armenian named Yossarian who is an individual with the characteristics used as a trend to produce functional satiric literature. Yossarian is a character who has a strong, definitive personality; he is realistic, cynical, paranoid and skeptical. Heller has placed this character, as the main protagonist, in a war setting on a small island called Pianosa. Yossarian is under the command of the bureaucracy of the army, but does not share the patriotism and willingness to die for his that, other people in his unit have. His major concern is for his own life and his main goal is to come out of the war alive; a goal which is increasingly complicated wch time the number of missions he has to fly is raised. Yossarian’s overt attempts to get out of combat duty and his cynical method of viewing the world soon cast him as an outsider. Yossarian’s paranoia is grounded on the premise that your friends may be against you just as well as your enemies are. Yossarian’s opionion is that “The enemy is anybody who’s going to get you killed, no matter which side he’s on, and that includes Colonel Cathcart. And don’t you forget that, because the longer you remember it, the longer you might live” (Heller 134). Heller emphasizes Yossarian’s creed in the next sentence: “But Clevinger did forget it, and now he was dead” (Heller 134). Yossarian’s anti-war views, his paranoia, his cynicism cast him as an outsider in the camp. Unlike Huck Finn, Yossarian is forced to stay on the island of Pianosa or in one of his two retreats. Yossarian is one of the representatives of society that Heller uses, and cannot totally escape. Yossarian’s only methods of retreat are to the hospital or to Rome. Joseph Heller makes it clear that Yossarian is using the hospital only to escape from flying the missions. “Yossarian ran right into the hospital, determined to remain there forever rather than fly one mission more than the thirty-two missions he had…He could enjoy himself in the hospital, just as long as there was no one really very sick in the same ward” (Heller 174). Yossarian viewed the hospital as better than flying missions; his main emphasis was on himself, his individual life, and not the establishment or the war. From Yossarian’s point of view: “Being in the hospital was better than being over Bologna or flying over Avignon with Huple and Dobbs at the controls and Snowden dying in back” (Heller 174). Joseph Heller’s character Yossarian works effectively as a satiric protagonist because his strong individual traits place him outside the conventionalities of society for him to comment on objectively.
Yossarian is not a typical naïve character in a satiric novel. Satirists can use the trait naivete in their characters as a trend to distance the protagonist further from the convention on which he is evaluating. However, Heller realizes a character does not have to be completely naïve or inexperienced to be viewed as a satiric character. Although Yossarian is admittedly not innocent, as is clearly evidenced throughout the novel, he does make an important discovery about war. The experience catapults him forward to the human destruction and horror in Rome after its bombing, his eventual desertion to Sweden and ultimately shapes his final view on the senselessness of war. The occurrence of Snowden’s death is the event that Yossarian faces that makes his knowledge of the brutality of war complete. His education is concluded “on the hideous first mission to Avignon the moment he realized the fantastic pickle he was in” (Heller 340). Snowden represents to Yossarian the full brutality, senslessness and horr of war. Without this knowledge a man in combat has a large quantity of innocence in his character. The reader, knowing that Yossarian now has a comprehensive knowledge of war and death, the perception of the events that Yossarian changes focus. The new roommates in Yossarian’s tent appear as more innocents and to the reader, and his treatment of them more understandable. The roomates are presented as ignorant of war and devoid of all the knowledge Yossarian posseses.
The moment he saw them, Yossarian knew they were impossible…They were obtuse; their morale was good. They were glad that the war had lasted long enough for them to find out what combat was really like. They were halfway through unpacking when Yossarian threw them out (Heller 357).
This episode magnifies Yossarian’s cynicism, yet after the Snowden scene, the reader now knows Yossarian’s action of throwing the roommates out is justifiable and sane. Once Joseph Heller has achieved this understanding with the reader his job as a satirist is nearly complete.
Yossarian, as a character, is flawed. His treatment of women is certainly questionable, he drinks, and he visits whorehouses. When Yossarian was flying with Milo to distract Orr from watching where Milo gets his eggs; “Yossarian and Orr found themselves jammed into the same double bed with the two twelve-year-old twenty-eight-year-old prostitutes, who turned out to be oily and obese and who kept waking them up all night to switch partners” (Heller 239). Besides his behavior in regards to women, some would say he shirks his duty by hiding in the hospital and refusing to fly missions. However, as discussed with Huckleberry Finn, the satirist creates the protagonist of the satiric novel with flaws to create a believable tension between the individual and society. Joseph Heller makes Yossarian’s multiple flights to the hospital bed seem very plausible, rational and sane. However, despite his flaws, if Yossarian were a perfect individual, and always kept his temper, followed commands unquestionably, and moralized over other men’s actions, Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 would not have served any purpose but to chronicle Everyman’s conquest by society.
The novel Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is also a satiric novel and was published first in the 1960’s. The novel’s protagonist follows many of the trends that satirists apply to their main characters. The main character in Cat’s Cradle is John—or Jonah—and he is an outsider like Huck Finn and Yossarian. His trip to Illium is the first place that the reader comes in contact with John, and his actions and words seem only to accentuate his pessimism. When he first meets Breed, John contrasts himself with him. “Breed…was civilized, optimistic, capable, serene. I, by contrast, felt bristly, diseased, cynical. I had spent the night with Sandra. My soul seemed as foul as smoke from burning cat fur. I thought the worst of everyone…”(Vonnegut 27). When he returns to New York his apartment is ruined by a nihilist that he barely knew and his cat is dead, and he is suspended without a place to belong. His history of pessimism has left him alone and divorced twice: “My second wife had left me on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with” (Vonnegut 77). John’s description of himself before Bokonism sums up his past as a pessimist well: “When I was a younger man—two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago…I began to collect material for a book to be called The Day the World Ended. It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then” (Vonnegut 1). At the beginning of his journey from Illium to San Lorenzo, John is left with nothing. He leaves to San Lorenzo almost on a whim, after falling in love with a girl in a photograph. He comes into San Lorenzo having shed his past and society, with no possessions and no place in life. John is an individual on the outside of society, too pessimist to be an optimist, not enough of an idealist to be a realist. He belongs to no one and to no where, and he steps onto San Lorenzo knowing only about the island what he read in a book. Kurt Vonnegut has created a character that, almost completely, is an outsider from everywhere he has been and to the place, he is going.
Huckleberry Finn was naïve because of his youth, and his lack of experience. Yossarian’s was naïve because he did not fully comprehend the gruesome savageness of war until the confrontation with Snowden’s death. Vonnegut’s protagonist John also has a degree of innocence. As with Yossarian, John does not have the conventional definition of innocence. He has more experience with the world, yet is much vulnerable and accepting than Huck Finn. Most of his naiveté comes from his almost implausible and impulsive love of Mona, whom he travels to a tiny Caribbean island to meet based on the impression from a photograph. Before his love for Mona, John focuses several times on the lack of love in his life: “…and two wives and no wife…And no love waiting for me anywhere…And the listless life of an ink-stained hack…” (Vonnegut 201). When Mona marries him (because he is President), he demands that she not perform boko-maru with any other people, despite the fact that it is part of her religion. When Mona threatens to leave him, he offers to take on her religion: “Could I have your religion, if I wanted it?”(Vonnegut 209). John’s innocence of San Lorenzo and Bokonism enables him to be a qualified individual to demonstrate societies’ blind acceptance of religion, even when continually reminded that is all “foma”.
Kurt Vonnegut’s character John also has flaws, which are similar to Yossarian’s in Catch 22. On John’s first night in Illium, he got drunk in a bar, the Cape Cod Room, which doubled as a “hangout for whores”. He had a discussion with a whore named Sandra (who he ended up spending the night with):
We talked about truth. We talked about gangsters; we talked about business. We talked about the nice poor people who went to the electric chair; and we talked about the rich bastards who didn’t We talked about religious people who had perversions. We talked about a lot of things. We got drunk (Vonnegut 22).
This account of a conversation with a whore both serves to simultaneously highlight John’s pessimissim, insight into society and his loneliness. John’s obsession with Mona Monzano also could be seen as a flaw. “The mirage of what it would be like to be loved by Mona Aamons Monzano, had become a tremendous force in my meaningless life” (Vonnegut 85). John’s sudden love for Mona discloses a much larger facet of his personality that includes impetuosity and impulsiveness.
Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, John Heller’s Catch 22 and Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle all have protagonists that exhibit, in various degrees, some of the major trends of that satirists use in their characters. Huck, Yossarian, and John are all isolated from society, have flaws and are innocent in some respects. The satirist can control what areas of society he wants to focus on by weighing the degree of their isolation, the proportion of the flaws to the whole person and how naïve they are and to what factors of society.
Works Cited
Heller, Joseph. Catch 22. New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1994.
Sniderman, Stephen L. “It was All Yossarian’s Fault”. Twentieth Century Literature. Vol 19:4, pg 251-257. Oct. 1973.
Strehle, Susan. “Satire Beyond the Norm”. Contemporary Lit. XXXVII. Pg 45-47. 1996
Strickland, Carol C. “Of Love and Loneliness, Society and Self in Huckleberry Finn”. Mark
Twain Journal. 21:4, pg 50-53. 1983.
Twain, Mark. Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Jane Ogborn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat’s Cradle. New York: Dell Publishing, 1998.