Jay Cantor, "Our Town" and "The Gadget," from Krazy Kat


1. At the beginning of "The Gadget," we’re told that "since that day at Alamogordo, Krazy felt that she, too, might be rotten." Why does she feel implicated in what happened that day? What is the connection between this feeling and her conviction that "less suddenly seemed like lots, and next to nothing was best of all"?

2. Borrowing its characters and many of its situations from George Herriman’s classic early-twentieth-century comic strip, "Krazy Kat," Cantor’s novel is profoundly and explicitly "intertextual." The original strip, however, is not the only source of intertextuality in the novel. Identify some of the other instances of intertextuality in this excerpt. How would you characterize these other "texts"--for example, are they specific to a particular time and place? Are they somehow related to Krazy’s inability to get back to work?

3. Identify the structural features of the comic-strip form (e.g., the rapid shifts in scenery; the "gap between the panels") that Jay Cantor works into the narrative of Krazy Kat. How might these features have contributed to the humor of the original strip?

4. Having "watched uncomprehendingly the slow shift from vaudeville to motion pictures, to radio, to television," Krazy wonders what will come "next? computers? video games? How would the next generation tell its stories?" The sequence she articulates here traces the transition from the communication technologies and artistic media of modernism to those of postmodernism. Yet Krazy’s concern about whether she would "even understand" the next generation’s stories seems to have more to do with changes in taste than technology. On what grounds does she object to these new, "cute" cartoon cats, and how might her criticisms be understood as a critique of postmodernist aesthetics by modernist aesthetics?