Cat’s Cradle (1963). Content and Description

The novel’s title is taken from a child’s game called cat’s cradle, a series of string figures made of one’s fingers. While the game may explain the book’s strung-together, multichapter form, we do not learn of the game’s symbolic significance until the narrator/protagonist discusses it with a scientist’s son, whose father enjoyed playing the game and then taunting him, making him a disillusioned “little person” at odds with the world.

Set in both the United States and a mythical Caribbean republic called San Lorenzo, where the military dictator, Papa Monzano, conspires with the inventor of the island’s religion, Bokonon, Cat’s Cradle has a simple plot. A writer researching a book on the bombing of Hiroshima contacts the three children of an atomic bomb scientist (Dr. Felix Hoenikker); journeys to San Lorenzo to speak with the middle child, Frank, who has become the minister of science and progress on the island; eventually meets all three Hoenikker children; falls in love with the island’s object of beauty, Mona; converts to the island’s religion of Bokononism; and witnesses the end of the world brought about by one of Dr. Hoenikker’s inventions: Ice-Nine.

We arrive at the island of San Lorenzo and an understanding of the Hoenikker family, the religion of Bokonon, and the inhumanity of science through the eyes of the storyteller: a man named John who calls himself Jonah, a name with tragicomic biblical overtones. Jonah/John is obsessed with a single cataclysmic moment in human history: August 6, 1945, the day the United States dropped “Little Boy”—an atomic bomb possessing the power of 16 kilotons of TNT—on Hiroshima, Japan, killing more than 140,000 people.

But, unlike the bombing of Hiroshima, the Book of Jonah in the Bible and Cat’s Cradle are comic stories. In the biblical story God sends Jonah to the sinful city of Nineveh to prophesy its destruction. Ironically, rather than make this trip, Jonah immediately boards a ship to another city (Tarshish). When God sees this, he creates a mighty storm. The other sailors on the ship realize that Jonah has incurred the wrath of God and throw him overboard, where, in the tempestuous seas, he is swallowed by a whale for three days and three nights. God then sends Jonah on this mission again; this time Jonah prophesies gloom and doom: the end of the world. Ironically, God saves Nineveh, making Jonah a failed, dejected prophet.

There are many interesting comparisons here to be made. One lies in Vonnegut’s “outsider” status as a social critic; he is a kind of gloom-and-doom prophet whose warnings are not heeded. But, the story of Jonah also reveals the mystery of God: the strange way that justice, which is not absolute, lies beyond human understanding. In this way Jonah in the Bible, John/Jonah in his novel about the end of the world, Bokonon in his sacred books, and Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle perform prophetic roles for lost worlds, places where human beings, with their inward-focused vision and with their desire to control, lose sight of moral concerns.

At the center of Vonnegut’s world and perhaps of Jonah/John’s karass—one of Bokonon’s terms, referring in this case to a group of people who, without knowing one another, are fated to complete or take part in a historical event—are the Hoenikker children, abandoned by their often nihilistic father, who invests himself fully only in science. The Hoenikker children live in a world without morals, a world where God is absent.

Like spokes on a wheel, the Hoenikker children, all freaks of nature in one way or another, are obsessed with the doomsday substance their father has made, all covertly carrying pieces of it wherever they go. Angela, the eldest child, who is taken out of high school in her sophomore year to be a housekeeper and stand-in wife for her father, marries Harrison C. Connors, who desperately wants Ice-Nine. Her younger brother, Frank, who has lived in the basement of a hobby shop, has fashioned a perfect island country out of plywood, houses ants in a glass prison, and, as his father, has strong ideas but cannot face the public, becomes the minister of science and progress of San Lorenzo after bribing the dictator with Ice-Nine.

Last is Newt, the youngest Hoennikker child, who is psychically wounded by his cat’s cradle play time with his father, is sent to a school for grotesque children (Newt is a “little person”) and creates paintings that are cynical depictions of the meaninglessness of life. While these characters are over-the-top creations who are not found in the real world, they collectively show how modern society worships technology and science, how we all desire power and control, and how easily power and knowledge can corrupt and deform.

As so many experimental novelists do, Vonnegut draws upon his own experiences in his creations. Significantly, Vonnegut’s idea for the novel originated in his time working for General Electric and his work with a particular scientist, whom Vonnegut satirized with the character of Felix Hoenikker. In a Paris Review interview, Vonnegut explains the genesis of the Felix Hoenikker character and “Ice-Nine”:

Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the absentminded scientist, was a caricature of Dr. Irving Langmuir, the star of the GE research laboratory. I knew him some. My brother worked with him. Langmuir was wonderfully absentminded. He wondered out loud one time whether, when turtles pulled in their heads, their spines buckled or contracted. I put that in the book. One time he left a tip under his plate after his wife served him breakfast at home. I put that in. His most important contribution, though, was the idea for what I called “Ice-9,” a form of frozen water that was stable at room temperature. He didn’t tell it directly to me.

It was a legend around the laboratory—about the time H. G. Wells came to Schenectady. That was long before my time. I was just a little boy when it happened—listening to the radio, building model airplanes. . . . Any- way—Wells came to Schenectady, and Langmuir was told to be his host. Langmuir thought he might entertain Wells with an idea for a science- fiction story—about a form of ice that was stable at room temperature. Wells was uninterested, or at least never used the idea. And then Wells died, and then, finally, Langmuir died. I thought to myself: finders, keepers—the idea is mine. Langmuir, incidentally, was the first scientist in private industry to win a Nobel Prize.

As with so many of his works, Vonnegut draws upon real world events and actual people in his far-reaching social satires. Speaking to a generation of youth disillusioned by the Vietnam War and the cold war, Cat’s Cradle made Vonnegut a household name and the subject of many college-classroom discussions. The University of Chicago granted Vonnegut his master’s degree in anthropology many years after his original thesis was rejected, accepting Cat’s Cradle in its place.

To grasp the significance of Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut’s first commercial success, we should think about the tradition of realism usually associated with the novel form. Especially in the late 19th century, American authors were concerned with verisimilitude, the appearance of reality in fiction and conforming to the long tradition of representation that Aristotle refers to in his Poetics as mimesis. Thus, Herman Melville, for example, provides pages and pages of taxonomical descriptions of whales—a sort of scientific grounding for his novel—at the beginning of Moby-Dick. With Cat’s Cradle, however, Vonnegut breaks from this tradition and creates an “antinovel,” an experimental form with no pretensions of realism (verisimilitude).

For Samuel Beckett, Michel Butor, and Alain Robbe-Grillet, significant experimental novelists who prefigure Vonnegut’s work, the novel is an elastic form with which both authors play. In Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable (1953), for example, the world is eclipsed; we find ourselves in the mind of a head severed from its body, a head placed in a restaurant window beside the menu. Thus, the antinovel is often bizarre and absurd and relies on the reader to provide both concrete references and meaning.

Characteristics of the antinovel include experiments with vocabulary, punctuation, syntax, variations of time sequence, alternate endings and beginnings, and collage, a form that allows authors to piece together discontinuous fragments. The antinovel can also lack plot, character development, and many other traditional elements we associate with literature. So, the question remains, What makes Cat’s Cradle an antinovel?

With its opening epigraph, “Nothing in this book is true,” both Vonnegut’s chosen line and an excerpt from the book embedded in the novel called “The Books of Bokonon,” the author breaks with the tradition of representing reality in fiction: Cat’s Cradle, as does the nonexistent religious text it frequently describes, announces its own status as artifice even before the narrative starts. This self-referential quality, as fiction calls attention to its own status as art, is a hallmark of what is often referred to as metafictional writing. Though many novels throughout the literary tradition exhibit some metafictional qualities, they predominate in contemporary fiction, especially in the works of authors such as Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garda Marquez, and others who are known for their breaking with the conventions of realism. Vonnegut’s novel about the end of the world contains a mixture of forms in its 127 short chapters, including parables, poetry, saints, and even sinners. It is a kind of Bible.

Readers note the close resemblance of “The Books of Bokonon,” Lionel Boyd Johnson’s religious text in Vonnegut’s work, to the Book of Mormon, the sacred text purportedly dictated to Joseph Smith that forms the basis for the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Not only does Von- negut make fun of Mormonism but of organized religion as a whole in this book, in which religious followers know they believe in lies and rub their feet in a sacred communion ritual. Thus, throughout the novel Vonnegut satirizes everything from religion to law to science to technology to nuclear proliferation to the cold war. Though Vonnegut’s works depart from the tradition of realism we associate with the conventional novel, his use of satire attempts to amend vices Vonnegut sees in our world, vices especially relevant to the period during which he was writing, when the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a heated arms race and many Americans were beginning to protest the Vietnam War.

According to Jonathan Swift, a writer considered to be one of the finest satirists in the English language, “Satire is a sort of looking glass wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own, which is the chief reason for the kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are” (“The Preface of the Author”). Like Swift, Vonnegut is a master satirist who is often misunderstood. Satire is a flexible form that enables Vonnegut to replace the conventions of realism with grotesque characters, an unbelievable plot, and an apocalyptic setting, one where a technological creation of a scientist lacking a moral vision destroys the world.

This scientist, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, helps form Vonnegut’s bitter assault on our obsession with science, technology, and progress. In the end, Cat’s Cradle is a work that can be described by the last lines of “The Books of Bokonon,” which are both chilling and hilarious. As Bokonon does, Vonnegut creates a history of human stupidity, one that challenges us to think about our foibles, horrifies us with our own destructive potential, shows us the bankrupt nature of social institutions and the many delusional aspects of organized religions, and leads us to reimagine our place in a world where, although there may be “No damn cat. No damn cradle,” we must create ways of living that are more humane and come to grips with the paradox central to Bokononist thought: “the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it” (284).

For Discussion or Writing:
1. Read the Book of Jonah in the Bible. After reading this story, consider the literary allusion Vonnegut employs when he names Cat’s Cradle’s narrator Jonah/John. Why is this naming significant? What connections can you make between Cat’s Cradle and the Book of Jonah?

2. How does Vonnegut satirize organized religion in the novel? What does Vonnegut’s satirical portrait of religion accomplish; how is it significant?

3. Both Cat’s Cradle and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) deal with nuclear proliferation and the terror of the cold war. View the film Dr. Strangelove and consider the comedic approach both the movie and Vonnegut’s novel take toward this serious subject. Why do both employ humor? Why is their humor effective? What happens when writers and filmmakers use comedy to deal with serious issues?

4. The novel contains several artists and writers, including Newt Hoenikker, Julian Castle, and Jonah/John. Why does Vonnegut include these figures? Is Vonnegut making a statement about art, its meaning and purpose, by including such figures in his book? Consider Newt’s painting, Julian’s writings and paintings, and Jonah/John’s text. What do these things have in common? Why are the similarities and subject matter of their art significant to the novel as a whole?

5. Before the novel begins, Vonnegut provides a table of contents with many chapter names. Looking at the table of contents by itself, what connections can you make? Why would Vonnegut include the table of contents? Why is it significant that the book is composed of so many short chapters?