Kurt Vonnegut

"Cat's Cradle" is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.

Cat's Cradle

Tiff Brunson

“I was fired for pessimism. Communism had nothing to do with it.”

"I got him fired," said his wife. "The only piece of real evidence produced against him was a letter I wrote to the New York Times from Pakistan." 

"It said a lot of things," she said, "because I was very upset about how Americans couldn't imagine what it was like to be something else, to be something else and proud of it."

“But there was one sentence they kept coming back to again and again in the loyalty hearing," sighed Minton.  “‘Americans,' " he said, quoting his wife's letter to the Times, “‘are forever searching for love in forms it never takes, in places it can never be. It must have something to do with the vanished frontier.'"

"It was an iron chair a man had been roasted alive in," said Crosby. "He was roasted for murdering his son. 

"Only, after they roasted him," Hazel recalled blandly, "they found out he hadn't murdered his son after all.”

Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country's doing it. We're one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research. When most other companies brag about their research, they’re talking about industrial hack technicians who wear white coats, work out of cookbooks, and dream up an imnproved windshield wiper for next year's Olds- mobile.”

"Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that." 

“That's very generous of General Forge and and Foundry Company.”

“ Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.”

Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.

“ Dr. Hoenikker used to say that any scientist who couldn't explain to an eight-year-old what he was doing was a charlatan.” 

"Then I'm dumber than an eight-year-old," Miss Pefko mourned. I don't even know what a charlatan is."

'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' Dr Felix Hoenikker, one of the founding fathers of the atomic bomb, has left a deadly legacy to the world. For he is the inventor of Ice-nine, a lethal chemical capable of freezing the entire planet. The search for its whereabouts leads to Hoenikker's three eccentric children, to a crazed dictator in the Caribbean, to madness. Will Felix Hoenikker's death wish come true? Will his last, fatal gift to humankind bring about the end that, for all of us, is nigh? Told with deadpan humour and bitter irony, Kurt Vonnegut's cult tale of global apocalypse preys on our deepest fears of witnessing the end and, worse still, surviving it . . . 'The time to read Vonnegut is just when you begin to suspect that the world is not what it appears to be. He is not only entertaining, he is electrocuting. You read him with enormous pleasure because he makes your hair stand on end' The New York Times

里森

siegs

A fun and quick read. My first foray into Vonnegut's curious and creative mind. Some very, very choice quotes came out of this text that I'll take with me for a while.

Pedro Figueiredo

Now my favourite of his books, the writing in Cat's Cradle is sublime.

A young writer decides to interview the children of a scientist primarily responsible for the creation of the atomic bomb

Apurva Chitnis

I really enjoyed Cat's Cradle! It was a fun read, and I wrote about it my blog here: https://apuchitnis.substack.com/p/tru.... Sharing an excerpt below!

To continue the theme of what I am now calling my nuclear summer (see last week’s post on HBO’s Chernobyl), this past week I read Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut.

Cat’s Cradle is a story about many things. Ostensibly it’s a story about ice-nine — a form of water that is solid at room temperature and which, if it came into contact with any sufficiently large body of water, would cause the freezing of all oceans and the cessation of all life on Earth as we know it — the equivalent of a nuclear war.

But more fundamentally, it’s about the value of truth, and offers a viewpoint that HBO’s Chernobyl, and perhaps myself, don’t agree with.

So let’s dig in!

HBO’s Chernobyl
I loved HBO’s Chernobyl. It was one of the best told stories that I’ve watched, listened to, or read in the last year. But as I mentioned in my post last week, the show was not from perfect, and I found the occasional lack of historical accuracy most disturbing.

The last line in the show is:

“where I once would fear the cost of truth, I only ask”—the screen dramatically fades out to black—“what is the cost of lies?”

Chernobyl’s key message — a commentary on the current global war on truth, and socialism’s ills vs democracy’s boons — is that that lies have an unenviable cost. In this case it’s of inevitable disaster, emergency evacuations, and ultimately, death.

But where the show falls short is in it’s own commitment to the truth. It misrepresents the unknown danger inherent in the reactor (truth: it was known and documented, and indeed US reactors occasionally used similar designs), the deaths on the bridge (truth: these are fictional, an urban legend), the size of the second steam explosion (truth: it would have been much smaller1), and much else.

Nonetheless, we hear the director’s message as it is, and take their logic one step further to their inevitable conclusion: that truth is the solution to our ills, the antidote to any poison.


Cat's Cradle, generated by Substack. Cat’s Cradle is a game where you create a pattern of strings between your fingers. It appears to be a mess, but there’s some underlying structure.
Cat’s Cradle
In contrast, Cat’s Cradle offers the exact opposite message: that the unguarded truth leads to unfathomable terror, and that lies are necessary to make it through life.

Truth
Vonnegut’s belief that the truth is innately harmful is beautifully shown through the characters of his story and their attitudes in life.

No one exemplifies this more than the one of the central characters — Felix Honikker, a fictional dual of Robert Oppenheimer, who built the atomic bomb used in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. In contrast to Oppenheimer, who felt some regret in his guiding role in delivering the atrocity, Honikker is placid. He had no care for his role in developing the bomb; his only interest is in discovering the truth:

[in science] men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.

Dr. Asa Breed, Honikker’s colleage

New knowledge is the most valuable commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.

Dr. Asa Breed, Honikker’s colleage

I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that's the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.

Marvin Breed, a fierce critic of Honikker

Beware of the man who works hard to learn something, learns it, and finds himself no wiser than before.

Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon

Vonnegut served in WII and survived the Dresden fire-bombing as a prisoner of war by hiding in the basement of a slaughterhouse. Upon leaving, he saw the city completely destroyed. He was tasked with finding bodies in the rubble, a task he referred to as “terribly elaborate Easter-egg hunt”, and developed a unyielding sense for the rest of his life that war is unjust, in any form.

Vonnegut’s belief here is clear: that the truth, and any pursuit of it2, is dangerous and harmful.

Lies
Vonnegut’s thoughts on lies is best told through his fictional religion, Bokononism.

It’s a fascinating religion, full of hilarious behaviours and quotes, but his core point is that the point of the religion isn’t to discover truth, but to offer people a story to guide their life:

Live by the harmless untruths that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.

Anyone unable to understand how useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon

Bokononism is able to provide purpose and contentment for it’s followers that government cannot, whether it’s the despotic and inept regime of San Lorenzo3, a fictional state, or the granfaloon (a meaningless association of people) of superpowers such as the United States.

Indeed, Bokononism doesn’t make any qualms about it’s falsity:

Don't be a fool! Close this book at once! It is nothing but foma [harmless lies]!

Bokonon, in the Book of Bokonon

Knowing his deceit, Bokonon guides his followers to generally be good to one another, follow meaningless rituals, and simply just live — because, in Vonnegut’s view, life has no meaning or fundamental basis, and any form of organisation whether it is religion or government, should only serve to make life bearable.

Vonnegut believes that we too often look for the truth and meaning of life, but really it’s a tangled mess — a Cat’s Cradle.

Understanding your purpose in this mess is nigh on impossible and it’s too easy to follow and get sucked into the wrong thing. But even if you do discover something, humans are stupid enough to build machines of their own destruction. So instead of searching for the harmful truth, why not be kind and let things simply be instead?

Again, Vonnegut’s belief is clear: lies and arbitrary purpose are important — they make life bearable.

My reckoning
So, what’s my take on all this?

I really enjoyed Cat’s Cradle. It’s a hilarious story that is waiting for it’s big-screen adaptation, and offers us a compelling and critical view of 1960s America, commenting on it’s new religion of war (notably in Vietnam), increasing inequality, fight against socialism, and the innate stupidity of mankind.

But I do think discovering truth is important, more so than Vonnegut, but less so than HBO’s Chernobyl. I also believe that problems that arise from the truth aren’t an innate property of truth, but of it’s executors — human beings, like ourselves.

But this post is already getting long, and I think I’ll save those thoughts for later.

A very fun and interesting read. Great use of satire and irony to question ideas of Truth, religion and human interactions. A lot of silly interactions. Clever and dead pan. Finished this one about two weeks ago and am still thinking about it. 

“A free-wheeling vehicle . . . an unforgettable ride!”—The New York Times Cat’s Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut’s satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet’s ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist, a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer, and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny. A book that left an indelible mark on an entire generation of readers, Cat’s Cradle is one of the twentieth century’s most important works—and Vonnegut at his very best. “[Vonnegut is] an unimitative and inimitable social satirist.”—Harper’s Magazine “Our finest black-humorist . . . We laugh in self-defense.”—Atlantic Monthly

A Novel

salem

assuming that i'm just not smart enough for this book.

jess

My first Vonnegut's novels and well, to be honest, writing wise it is well written; many dark humour which is still relevant until now. I do laugh but mostly confused 80% of the time, but for starters who never read Vonnegut's novels before, this is an very unorthodox book. After I read the book, all I could think of is : I must read another Vonnegut's books to fully understand his work. Describing this book for me is not as black and white as most other critics who have taken the time to read through the 127 odd 'chips' that barely qualify as chapters. I finished this book a few days ago, a shining beacon to my recovery from 'tsundoku' - the art of collecting books in the hope of reading them soon but never getting to them. In the days since, as I’ve been working through the hours, I have found myself questioning so many things: the book’s holes, the simplicity of its twists and turns, the incredibly efficient lucidity which the writer is lauded for - in the vein of Hemingway, all in the hope to clearly define what I feel about this book. I still haven’t made my mind up.
The book follows the very normal writer (John) whose sincere interest in the very abnormal children of Felix Hoenikker, the fictional father of the atomic bomb, takes him to an eerie little island in the Caribbean with weird people. The made-up 'Bokononist' culture is made-up in the clearest sense of the word. It helps you understand the reasoning behind the existence of world religions while raising questions about their effectiveness and the moral ramifications that follow their practice. It somehow embraces nihilism, both positive and negative. 
Some of my favorites goes, "I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person." 
I was not a fan of how some plot devices were abandoned so readily, and the swiftness with which some events unfolded, because they caused me a lot of confusion around the end. The characters fall into the same tropes we’ve read or seen many times before, the progression of the plot keeps you waiting for the climax that doesn’t exist. I felt pissed and pleased at the same time, and confusion as I closed the book. Nonetheless, I am just filled with anticipation towards understanding Vonnegut's intention, but hopefully it'll last as long as my confusion does.

Laura Mauler

Aamna

logan chung

oops. still love him!

If God, in all his cosmic loneliness, has decided to cruelly put us here in such a precarious and muddy situation, then the least we can do is show him that we've figured out how to have a good time.

Hannah Yang

cat's cradle is profoundly pessimistic -- as a commentary on human stupidity, it depicts a world where nothing functions or is meaningful (science, politics, religion) and where genuine human connection is pretty much nonexistent. sex is simply a means to continue the species, no longer desirable when the end of the species is definite and near; the groups we normally associate ourselves with (nationality, gender, same occupation, same school, etc) are mere granfaloons, attempts to make meaning where there is none.

in the world vonnegut depicts, what is 'true' doesn't matter; life is built atop a combination of disinterest in pursuing the truth and blatant lies that serve practical purposes (such as bokononism's role in keeping up the morale of people in an entirely impoverished, backwards island). in this aspect, i am probably semi-bokoninist in that i see truth as something instrumentally valuable rather than inherently valuable. i'm not particularly interested in the grand truths of the universe -- i don't think it's possible to live a particularly satisfactory life if you need the truth to be happy; i'd rather just have a functional worldview (to be clear: i don't endorse outright lies or manipulation and if humans do somehow discover an ultimate truth, cool beans. but i'm also not losing sleep over whether or not i really truly have free will, or what particular ethical theory is the most morally correct one ever, or something).

perhaps, as vonnegut seems to suggest, this passive acceptance of the world's many untruths is depressing and mildly catastrophic. but i'd suggest that humans are capable of finding a great deal of meaning in their lives if they're able to see past 'the futility of existence' etc. etc. -- sure, we may never know our true purpose or how the universe works, and perhaps in the grand tapestry of the universe our species constitutes a few unruly stitches that can be torn out at any time, but a lot of people could live happier lives if they allowed themselves to simply appreciate the threads that come together in their own lives. our species, lives, and individual identities may indeed be meaningless to the universe, but they need not be meaningless to us. 

so, i cannot agree with vonnegut's cynicism, particularly in the 'human connections' department. at the same time, i can't deny that cat's cradle is a thought-provoking book whose prose is also remarkably accessible. i think it's worth reading, but i hope that its influence is simply to make you think more critically about our world's institutions and social codes and belief systems, not to become a cynical critic of our world's institutions and social codes and belief systems.

Delaney LaFalce

Bouke van der Bijl

Matthew Royal

Gillian Rose

I knew this going in, but it was good to have it confirmed: I do not like Vonnegut!

I found this absolutely ridiculous. I get that it was a criticism on religion, but there was a way of doing so without employing racism at times and misogyny! Just a bad reading experience.

Rohan Uddin

What a funny, simple and crazy book! This is my first Vonnegut, and I must admit, it is wonderful in its execution of deadpan humor and satirical situations. Loved everything, especially the framing device : "The Books of Bokonon", and the self created myth behind the atom bomb and the City of San Lorenzo. This is too good.

Prashanth Srivatsa

Absolutely hilarious. Highly recommended.

In Cat’s Cradle, Vonnegut invites us to think deeply about religion, ‘purpose’, and the social webs we weave in daily life.

Taylor Griffin

Arun Khanna

The goal of good satirical work is to make us question the way the world works in an entertaining way. With Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut succeeds in this task with flying colors. He makes us question (or at least ponder to rethink) everything from religion to science. 

Within his patently absurd religion, Bokononism, there are some fascinating nuggets that make you question the establishment of organized religion. The whole idea of Bokononism purposely forbidden by the residents of San Lorenzo being part of its appeal reminds us of the early adherents of Christianity. The fact that one of the central tenets is that the entire book is full of lies (foma) is comical but does strike a chord in the modern take of religion (especially when viewing other people's religions).

Vonnegut also makes us question what many believe to be the opposite of religion, science. Felix Hoenikker, who obviously is brilliant and insanely intelligent, seemingly invents Ice-9 on a whim after being asked a question from a Marine general. He seems completely unaware of the consequences of his action. Vonnegut seems to strongly dislike "pure research," which is research that is completely devoid of potential ripples (one could also use the modern example of AI research as a substitute for Ice-9). 

This book was an entertaining read and one that I look forward to rereading in the future.

Alex Ker

Easy read and much-needed break from non-fiction. As always, I appreciate the precision of Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s dark wit and satire on religion, politics, humanity that distort, interrogate, accentuate our version of reality--sharing a Dystopian that is alarming, far-fetched, yet populated by self-aware and penetrating caricatures reminding us of people we might have known.

Tilde C

Little did I know so many wise and clever quotes attributed to Kurt Vonnegut were things he put in the mouth of his bizarre cult leader character. Almost made a bokononist out of me.

This was fun, though I still prefer Slaughterhouse-Five.

magic world of kurt. how much is it of ours to keep?

Dana M

juno

i had no idea what this book was about before i read it and i still don’t honestly. im not even sure how i would rate this so we’re going with three as a happy middle number.

Hans Gerwitz

This is an easy read and thought-provoking if you let it be. Which might pale in comparison to Vonnegut's works that leave you no such choice, but still stands out from the brain candy of most science fiction.

Cat's Cradle

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