y at the very existence of the Atonists plays into Reed’s satire of white European civilization. Reed practices, over and over, the act of well aimed ridicule. The novel’s most fundamental parodies lie in the novel’s mixing of verbal styles—both in the narrative modes, and in “high” and “low” forms of speech. Reed uses humorous verbal code switching and code mixing to deliberately change the nature of the interaction of this work. In describing an ancient Egyptian ruler as a “…man who can’t shake it ‘til he breaks it…” Reed is relying upon the comic effects of code switching to dismantle the barriers of communication (Reed 162). This frees the writer, and the reader, from the tyrannical linguistic constraints of formal speech. In this way,