Rating: 4/5, good
I first read this book when I was seventeen, as part of summer reading before senior year of high school. It’s a short book, but very dense and philosophical. It was a bit hard to read and I remember not quite getting it, but the idea that religion is human-constructed and shouldn’t be taken too seriously buried itself deep inside my brain like a wasp burrowing into an oak gall.
I recently reread it with my local science fiction book club and I understood and enjoyed it more on the second reading. I remembered most of the characters, the general outline of the plot and major scenes, and the fictional humanistic religion of Bokononism.
Cat’s Cradle is about a writer who is researching a book about what important people were doing the moment the U.S. dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. His research sets off a series of events that lead to him becoming the president of a small island in the Caribbean and the destruction of the world.
John, the writer, sends a letter to Newt, the youngest son of Dr. Hoenikker, the scientist who designed the bomb, asking him what Dr. Hoenikker was doing the moment of the atomic explosion. Newt sends back a reply describing how that morning his father was showing him cat’s cradle (a children’s game that’s played by making a series of shapes with a loop of string between one’s fingers). Newt, who had grown accustomed to being ignored by his neglectful father (and the children had no mother because she died giving birth to Newt because of an accident Dr. Hoenikker caused that damaged her pelvis), was frightened by the sudden attention and ran away into the backyard.
In the backyard, he finds the middle brother, Frank, shaking bugs in a jar to make them fight. Angela, the oldest sister, asks Newt what happened between him and his father. Newt whines about how much he hates his father, and Angela slaps him and tells him that their father just won the war. Then Frank punches Angela in the stomach (defending Newt? Or just joining in the violence?) and she rolls around on the ground in pain with Newt as Frank stands over them both laughing. Their father sticks his head out the window for a moment and then returns to whatever he was doing without a word.
I think this scene does a fantastic job of capturing the trauma of growing up with an emotionally unavailable father. Dr. Hoenikker reminds me a bit of my dad. I really related to Newt being frightened by sudden intense attention from his father after being ignored for a long time. My father was a little bit less detached than Dr. Hoenikker—he would have come down and yelled at us, then gone back to whatever he was doing—but I find Vonnegut’s portrayal of a distant father in a demanding career to be spot on. Vonnegut’s own father was an architect who Vonnegut described as a “dreamy artist”, so he might have had a similar experience growing up.
When Newt complains and Angela slaps him and tells him how great their father is, that’s also very true to life. We live in a society that values people based on objective achievement over how they treat others and where it’s taboo for children to criticize their parents (though that taboo seems to be fading if I’m Glad My Mom Died and the amount of young adults speaking out about abusive parents on social media is any indication).
There’s a lot of societal pressure on wives and children not to require much in the way of emotional support as long as the husband provides enough financial support and isn’t physically abusive. Our society doesn’t fully recognize emotional needs as needs, but while they may not be as vital as physical needs, they are important, everyone has them, and they’re nothing to be ashamed of. A lack of attention paid to children can lead to mental illness in adulthood. If a child is treated like they’re unimportant, they may grow up internalizing that belief which can manifest as depression or anxiety in adulthood.
On first glance, Newt seems very well-adjusted. John often remarks how well-possessed and masculine Newt is and how little being a dwarf seems to bother him. However, John isn’t privy to Newt’s thoughts. Newt flunks out of medical school shortly before writing his reply to John.
In the letter, he wrote:
“Next morning. Here I go again, fresh as a daisy after eight hours of sleep. The fraternity house is very quiet now. Everybody is in class but me. I’m a very privileged character. I don’t have to go to class any more. I was flunked out last week. I was a pre-med. They were right to flunk me out. I would have made a lousy doctor.’
‘After I finish this letter, I think I’ll go to a movie. Or if the sun comes out, maybe I’ll go for a walk through one of the gorges. Aren’t the gorges beautiful? This year, two girls jumped into one holding hands. They didn’t get into the sorority they wanted. They wanted Tri-Delt.”
The abrupt transition from the subject of his “privilege” to the girls’ suicide shows that Newt tries to be strong, but deep down he’s dealing with a lot of insecurity. By putting those two statements in the same paragraph he’s expressing that he’s feeling depressed without saying it directly.
Where Newt is putting on a brave face, Frank is trying not to show his. His high school classmates called him “Secret Agent X-9” because he acted distant and secretive. What he was actually doing with his time is funny so I won’t spoil it. Frank seems hard to read at first, but really all he wants is to keep his responsibilities to a minimum and do as little as possible (a mood!). In contrast to his illustrious father, he is content to live an anonymous, hedonistic lifestyle (his father was indifferent to the acclaim, while Frank deliberately avoids it).
I related to Newt the first time I read this because of his small stature, experience with his father, and the fact that his name is related to lizards, but I related more to Frank on the second read.
I did not relate to Angela, though I respect her a little more on second reading. The way she treats Newt like a child is really ableist, but she grew up being parentified, so she was forced to play that role for so long that I suspect she doesn’t know how to stop. That’s probably why Newt takes it so well, because he knows how much Angela went through and how much her life was limited by having to take care of her father and younger siblings (her dad literally pulled her out of high school sophomore year to look after himself and the kids). I really like how Vonnegut shows her suppressed rage coming through when she plays the clarinet for John and the others later in the book. Vonnegut’s writing generally isn’t very sympathetic to his female characters, so that may be why I had a harder time relating to Angela than to her male siblings.
All three of the Hoenikker kids are a little screwed up. They grew up without a mother, with a father that neglected them. There may or may not be a hereditary aspect to their issues: Hoenikker could be their biological father, but Dr. Asa Breed’s brother Martin suggests that they may have been Dr. Breed’s offspring. If they are Dr. Hoenikker’s biological children, though, they may have inherited some form of neurodivergence from him. Dr. Hoenikker seems autistic with his long-term special interest in science and disinterest in interacting with other humans. He also seems like he could be ADHD with his short-lived hyperfixation on turtles and difficulty with meaningless, repetitive tasks like personal grooming or cooking.
Hoenikker’s kids all seem a bit autistic. Frank’s consuming interest in model trains seems like a special interest. Angela’s hobby of playing the clarinet seems to help her cope with her social anxiety and isolation, which were part of her upbringing but could also have resulted from autism.
Newt seems pretty neurotypical at first glance, though there is the part where he drops the title:
“For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grownups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.’
‘Um.’
Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. ‘No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X’s…’
‘And?’
‘No damn cat, and no damn cradle.’
Newt’s ability to see through and unwillingness to play along with social constructs could be autistic traits.
Speaking of, what are the cats and the cradles in this book?
Religion obviously is a big one… Bokononism is a made-up religion that’s self-aware about being made-up. Rather than worship a God or gods, followers of Bokononism follow the teachings of Bokonon, a sage. The book of Bokonon does include a creation myth with gods, but these gods aren’t considered real since the beginning of the book of Bokonon starts by saying that everything contained in it is lies.
Why do the people of San Lorenzo follow Bokonon if he tells them everything he says is fictitious? The lies offer Bokononism’s adherents meaning to soften the indifferent machinations of the real world. Vonnegut hints that humans are driven to seek meaning (like “birds got to fly”), that plain truth doesn’t satisfy the human need for story (“truth isn’t enough for a person”).
I think the most attractive thing about made-up religions like Bokononism is that it’s not as prone to violence or repression as some other religions. There’s no God/gods to fight for or strict rules to be enforced upon the community. There’s a lot of harm caused in our world by people taking religion too seriously that a more laid-back approach to religion could help allay.
However, Bokononism doesn’t play out like this in Cat’s Cradle. One would think a simple religion with kindness and rejection of dogma at its core would be more resistant to violence, but San Lorenzo still is riddled with religious violence (not by members of the religion however, only by the government towards the members).
When Bokonon and his buddy Earl McCabe declared themselves rulers of San Lorenzo (with no opposition because it was worthless), McCabe took over political leadership while Bokonon started a new religion. Bokonon said McCabe should outlaw Bokononism to give it more “zest”, and McCabe agreed to his role as persecutor. Eventually, as McCabe cracked down harder and harder on Bokononist practice, executing Bokononists on the hook every two years or so, he realized that he had become corrupted and killed himself, appointing Papa Monzano as the next “president”/dictator.
This set up a struggle of good vs evil with the dictatorship of San Lorenzo trying to eliminate Bokononism and Bokononists trying to run from and subvert the authorities. San Lorenzo is officially Christian, but everyone including Papa Monzano practices Bokononism. The religious conflict itself is a sham, but it’s still technically violence.
Bokonon sums up the necessity for a villain like so:
“Because without “Papa’s” badness,
Tell me if you would,
How could wicked old Bokonon
Ever, ever look good?”
Bokonon and McCabe tried to make the island prosperous, but the soil was so poor they were unable to do it, so instead they made up a religion to distract the people from the true source and permanent nature of their poverty. The people are able to accept that they’re unhappy now because they have hope that if Bokonon defeats the dictator, then they could be happy in the future. This a critique of communism: Vonnegut points out that it’s easier to blame a villain than to accept that poverty is insoluble (there’s also a critique of capitalism through the depiction of H. Lowe Crosby as the greedy, boorish capitalist who wants to exploit San Lorenzan labor).
The source of religious violence in San Lorenzo boils down to economics, with religion being just a distraction from the people’s economic woes.
Another big cat/cradle in Cat’s Cradle is war. Similar to Slaughterhouse-Five, in Cat’s Cradle Kurt Vonnegut expounds on the senseless futility of war, how it only leads to suffering and death. There is a scene with a military exercise attacking effigies of the “enemies of democracy” where the ambassador character gives a speech. He talks about how war is born of man’s “stupidity” and “viciousness” and the only thing to celebrate about war is working towards an end to it. He refers to the dead soldiers as “murdered children”. The military exercise goes horribly wrong when a plane hits Papa Monzano’s castle, contaminating the ocean with ice-nine. I think the message is that in war, humans set out to hurt others, but end up hurting themselves (particularly when it comes to doomsday weapons).
H. Lowe Crosby’s support for war as defending capitalism and democracy and Papa Monzano’s support for war as a display of nationalist power are a bit dubious, but the idea that war can never be justified seems a bit too simple to me. The justifications of war in self-defense, in defense of allies, or to prevent genocide seem more legitimate. I think whether war is a sham or not depends on the reasons the war is fought and how accurately those reasons apply to the situation. On the other hand, Vonnegut has a good point that the justifications for war probably don’t matter much to the soldier bleeding out on the battlefield.
Religion and war are the biggest popular falsehoods in Cat’s Cradle, but a more subtle one is love. Bokonon says lovers are liars and that “the truthful are loveless”. Most of the characters have turbulent romantic relationships with the exceptions of the Crosbys (the pro-America capitalists) and the Mintons (the America-critical ambassadors). All of the younger people’s relationships are fake in some way: Newt gets scammed out of the secret of ice-nine by Zinka, Angela is abused by her husband although from the outside their relationship appears perfect, Frank is involved with a married woman who is keeping their affair secret from her husband, Jonah is infatuated with Mona despite not knowing her. Dr. Hoenikker’s relationship with Emily was also complicated by his neglect of her and her possible affair with Dr. Breed.
There is a lot of fakeness to most of the relationships in Cat’s Cradle, but remember that everything in the Books of Bokonon are foma, so perhaps the calypso that love isn’t real is actually a comforting lie told to soften the hard truth that some people don’t have love. The Crosbys seem to be in comfortable agreement with each other. I believe the Mintons are truly in love, so much so that it actually becomes dangerous because it weakens their attachment to life and the world.
Mona is interesting because she doesn’t feel individual love, only generalized platonic love for all humanity. She’s been made into a sex symbol because of her beauty, but she has no interest in sex, as Jonah finds out when they’re stuck in the oubliette and he forces her into having sex with him. She likes to do boko-maru, which is the joining of the soles (“souls”) of the feet, but she thinks of sex as just how babies are made, not in any way pleasurable, so she seems to be asexual. She seems very similar to Marilyn Monroe, who in her memoirs expressed concern about her own lack of interest in sex.
Vonnegut says the penultimate foma is the belief that human beings can do anything they set their minds to (apologies for use of the m word):
“When I hadn’t been writing, I’d been poring over The Books of Bokonon, but the reference to midgets had escaped me. I was grateful to Newt for calling it to my attention, for the quotation captured in a couplet the cruel paradox of Bokononist thought, the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality, and the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it.
Midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks,
For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks!”
In a figurative sense, Newt is “as big as what he hopes and thinks” in that his confidence makes others perceive him as though he were average height. In a literal sense, though, the reality remains that Newt will never be average height no matter how much confidence he projects.
Jonah says that we need to lie (Newt can be as big as he wants) because the reality (Newt is short) is too painful to acknowledge.
I question this, though: Do we really need the lies? Who needs the lies? I would posit that Newt does not—he’s the one who talks about cats and cradles and he’s not exactly running around threatening people for calling him short like Edward in Full Metal Alchemist. Newt is pretty comfortable with his height; it’s only others who tiptoe around it.
Newt is the one who brings this line to Jonah’s attention, but he doesn’t say how he feels about it, just that it’s no surprise he’s a Bokononist because Bokonon mentions little people. I wonder how seriously he takes the calypso… does he see it as motivational, comforting, or ironic? Based on how he reacted to failing out of med school, I think he strains against his limitations but ultimately accepts them (we saw that he was probably suicidal at first, but then it doesn’t come up again and he seems to move on with his life).
The idea that you can achieve whatever you want if only you try hard enough is fiction, but accepting personal limitations is painful. We often set high expectations at the outset because we hope to go as far as possible and don’t know where our limitations are yet, but sometimes aiming too high can make us fall short of our goals. It’s like shooting an arrow: you want to aim a little higher than the target, but if you aim too high you can expend too much energy on height and not get enough distance.
We want to believe that everyone has the same capabilities, but some people’s limitations are more rigid than others. Height is one aspect of ourselves that we can’t really change, so it’s better to accept it and move on than to keep standing on one’s tiptoes. There are a lot of instances where people expect too much from those with limitations or expect too much from themselves despite limitations and end up causing harm. It’s good to be ambitious, but it’s also important to be aware of limitations.
Kurt Vonnegut has expressed in interviews how badly American POWs did in European camps during WWII in terms of getting depressed and not taking care of themselves physically and how it was partially due to an American inability to recognize and accept failure. American culture is built on prosperity gospel, we believe in a type of magic where we attract more of what we focus on (aka “law of attraction” or The Secret). The shadow side of that is we believe that if we refuse to acknowledge something negative it will go away. The problem with this is that it doesn’t work and it can delay addressing the problem.
Vonnegut was critical of the American tendency to look away from problems. When his mother died of suicide the coroner’s report said it was an accident and everybody in his midwestern hometown of Indianapolis, Illinois kept saying it was an accident, but Vonnegut himself was interested in talking about it (according to PBS It’s Lit video).
Suicide comes up a lot in Cat’s Cradle. There’s the mention of the girls jumping off the bridge, McCabe’s suicide once he realizes he’s become the oppressive role he played, Papa Monzano’s due to pain from his illness, the Mintons (kind of a more passive suicide of allowing themselves to die to not make a fuss), Mona’s (out of existential angst?), the islanders of San Lorenzo (because Bokonon said G-d wanted them to), and in a way, humanity’s suicide via doomsday weapon. Suicide is fascinating because it goes against the human imperative to survive and the reasons behind it are usually like an unanswered riddle. Suicide is an expression of extreme pain, a rebellion against the natural order of things. It’s certainly a rich topic to explore in fiction.
There is a lot of deep meaning in Cat’s Cradle and it’s masterfully written, but there are also some parts that didn’t age so well.
For instance, there are no female scientists at the national laboratory, all the women working at the lab are typists taking dictation from the male scientists via phones in the basement. They call them the “Girl Pool” and Dr. Breed gives them chocolate for caroling on Christmas as a thank-you. I thought this was kind of demeaning and I didn’t really catch Vonnegut satirizing it, just portraying it.
Miss Pefko (Dr. Horvath’s secretary) repeatedly demurs from Dr. Breed’s assertions that the science they’re doing isn’t that hard and she could understand it if she tried. I can relate to Miss Pefko—who hasn’t had the experience of an expert in a field you’re not trained in saying “this is easy” when it’s actually quite complicated? It is demoralizing rather than motivating because if it’s easy but you don’t get it, that implies you’re stupid. I think Dr. Breed is genuinely trying to make science seem approachable, but his attitude is only making people feel stupider and defer to him more. On the other hand, he could be humble bragging, saying, “This is easy (for me).”
While I relate to Miss Pefko, I do wish there were a female scientist in this book because as it is it’s rather depressing. The text comes off like no matter how hard male scientists try to include women in science, women aren’t interested, which is a pretty misogynistic message. The field of physics and astronomy was comprised of 3% women scientists in the 1960s and is comprised of 11% women scientists today. Biology is roughly 50/50 and chemistry is 35% women, so other fields in science are more balanced, but the field of physics still has a long way to go.
There were few women physicists but there were some very important ones. I recently saw a talk by Tom Ramos (who released From Berkeley to Berlin: How the Rad Lab Helped Avert Nuclear War in February 2022) on the history of the invention of the atomic bomb. He discussed how Austrian-Swedish physicist Lise Meitner, working with Otto Robert Frisch, calculated a theory of nuclear fission, which the scientists depicted in Oppenheimer used to develop the atom bomb. Women scientists are sometimes overlooked because they don’t fit our cultural image of “scientist”. When writing history or even fiction we need to be aware of our biases and make an effort not to perpetuate received patterns that omit women’s achievements from the record because their gender contradicts our preconceptions about who is a scientist.
Vonnegut brings up the disparity between male and female scientists in physics and rather than exploring how gendered expectations or other factors may contribute to creating this reality, he sets it up as though the idea that women can understand science is foma (a comforting, useful lie) set against the stark truth that there were few women scientists. Maybe I’m misinterpreting something, but that’s how it came off to me.
I also thought the way the woman with the doghouse who claims to understand G-d’s will but can’t read blueprints is described is very gendered and appeals to the reader’s biases about women. “She believed that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.” I’m sure there are women who exist that are self-important, classist, and afraid of creepy-crawlies despite them being part of G-d’s creation that she claims to love, but I couldn’t imagine an author describing a male character in this manner.
Claire Minton (the ambassador’s wife) is probably the smartest female character in Cat’s Cradle. She can tell that Julian Castle is gay by reading the index of his book on the history of San Lorenzo. She also wrote the letter about Americans not being loved wherever they go that got her husband in trouble. She’s pretty smart, but her intelligence is more on the intuitive/humanities side.
Angela doesn’t seem terribly smart at first but she can play the clarinet like a madwoman and that takes some hard skills.
Mona is mysterious… she seems vacant, but she seems to have more going on under the surface. She’s a devoted Bokononist to her credit or detriment. She sees through the foma of the world, but perhaps takes Bokonon a bit too seriously.
Overall, I think Vonnegut tends to present his female characters in sexist ways that make an appeal to readers’ unconscious, semi-conscious, or fully-conscious biases about women. One could argue that there are few intelligent men in Cat’s Cradle as well, that all the characters are deeply flawed, but the way the female characters’ intelligence is presented as less important and the way the male characters’ flaws are presented as less important add up to the women’s intelligence being less important than the men’s. Dr. Hoenikker’s creation of ice-nine changes the world while Claire Minton’s intuitive abilities don’t make much of a difference. Maybe making a difference isn’t all it’s cracked up to be considering the kind of “difference” ice-nine made to the world, but overall the men’s contributions are still more effective than the women’s.
It leads to an interesting philosophical question, though: Is it better to make a small positive difference than a large negative difference? Is “importance” actually important or desirable when considered separately from value?
I think Vonnegut is intending to question the value of importance. Dr. Hoenikker’s neglect of his wife and children pales in comparison to the impact of his creation of the bomb on the world. In his family’s lives, though, and even in the eyes of the townspeople who knew his family, that failure was significant, albeit on a smaller, more personal scale. And in another sense his neglect of his children may have led to the global accidental outbreak of ice-nine, as he irresponsibly gave it to his children without giving them any guidance on how incredibly dangerous it was or how to keep foreign governments from getting their hands on it via romantic entanglements. Maybe if Dr. Hoenikker had been a more involved father his children would not have been so starved for love that they sold the world for it.
On the other hand, I don’t think Vonnegut is necessarily saying that leading a small-scale, positive life should be the ideal. I think he’s a bit ambivalent about the value of importance. As a writer, he courted fame for most of his career, and then was uncomfortable with it when he got it. I think he might be saying that ambition is folly, but to have ambitions is human.
The way that the ambitious life is aligned with men and the comfortable life is aligned with women is still really problematic, though. There are plenty of ambitious women and comfortable men, so that paradigm is out of date and was probably never universal.
The islanders are portrayed through a very colonialist lens. Other than Papa Monzano, Mona, and the Catholic priest, the islanders don’t have any individual characterization and are shown as a mass of poor, silent brown people that only get taken advantage of by the white colonizers. They believe in Bokonon uncritically despite Bokonon’s stating that he shouldn’t be believed and despite the government’s persecution of Bokononists (that at least shows some courage, though). They get oppressed by capitalism, organized religion (Catholicism), alternative spirituality (Bokononism), and government. They don’t really do anything except try to survive.
This portrayal is somewhat progressive in that it doesn’t sugarcoat how badly native peoples’ interactions with colonizers tend to go. It could have been worse—a more colonialist author might have shown the native people of San Lorenzo as primarily benefiting from contact with colonizers.
Kurt Vonnegut was researching a master’s thesis on Native American ghost dance, which was rejected for being too “simple” and “playful”. I can’t find much of Vonnegut discussing the ghost dance movement itself, which was a religion started by a Native American religious leader named Wovoka. Wovoka had a vision of heaven where G-d told him to tell the Native Americans to be peaceful, that Jesus would be reincarnated in 1892, and that performing the ghost dance all night for days on end would allow them to reunite with deceased loved ones. White people were afraid the ghost dance was a war dance, which led to the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 in which over 200 mostly unarmed Native Americans were killed by United States soldiers.
There are a lot of similarities between the ghost dance and Bokononism. They’re both peaceful, they both have a physical practice that brings people closer (boko-maru), they both have charismatic leaders, and they’re both persecuted by the government.
In a 1994 graduation speech where Vonnegut mentions the ghost dance, he focuses mainly on the charismatic leader element. The rest of that essay is mostly about his time in the Anthropology Department at the University of Chicago and Robert Redfield’s Folk Society (a simple, isolated, religious society). He basically says that charismatic leaders are bad and modern society could be improved by adopting some elements from folk society (though his examples are bit off—astrology? Wouldn’t that be a granfalloon?).
I think it’s a bit strange that Vonnegut talks about so many things in that essay but doesn’t touch the obvious lesson of the ghost dance movement, that the majority shouldn’t judge minority practices they don’t understand. The ghost dance was a movement of peace and white people interpreted it as a war dance. Actually, Vonnegut also interprets it as a war dance:
“He told me to compare the leadership which inspired a peaceful Indian tribe to fight the United States Army, the so-called ‘Ghost Dance’”
Oh. Well, apparently we have a completely different understanding of what the ghost dance was. I don’t know if that’s due to the ideas that were popular at the time when Vonnegut was in grad school vs today or if Vonnegut was unusually colonialist in his view of Native Americans. The ghost dance was peaceful, so I really don’t know what Vonnegut’s talking about here with the ghost dance inspiring Native Americans to fight the United States Army. I really wonder what materials he was studying and what he was writing about the ghost dance (actually, maybe I don’t want to know).
Open Culture says he wrote his thesis on his “Shape of Stories” theory. I don’t know if he ever published the ghost dance paper… in 1971, the university accepted Cat’s Cradle as his master’s thesis for anthropology.
Anyway, the portrayal of native peoples in Cat’s Cradle and in Vonnegut’s other work is pretty colonialist.
The portrayal of black characters in Cat’s Cradle leaves something to be desired as well. Bokonon is the most central black character. He’s kind of a trickster Anansi-like character, but he could also be seen as an example of the Magical Negro trope because his role is to provide guidance for the white main character. The main character calls Bokonon the j-slur towards the end of the book for the “chain of gas chambers” calypso. I think Bokonon’s wisdom makes him okay representation, but it could go either way.
Lyman Enders Knowles, who works the elevator in the laboratory, is “insane, I’m almost sure—offensively so, in that he grabbed his own behind and cried, ‘Yes, yes!’ whenever he felt that he’d made a point.” What follows is a funny but slightly uncomfortable conversation about technology, scientists, Dr. Hoenikker, and Dr. Hoenikker’s children (“babies full of rabies” lol). Even reading this in high school, I thought this was racist. There could be a person with these particular tics, but it still reads like a caricature. Also, the fact that both Bokonon and Lyman Enders Knowles are the only black characters and both are depicted as crazy but wise seems a little racist.
Mona’s mother is San Lorenzan and her father is Finnish, but Jonah calls her a Negro in his narration. The way Jonah lusts after her as an exotic other is gross. She also follows the same pattern of crazy but wise which I feel is a slightly negative stereotype about black people.
So is Cat’s Cradle worth reading?
Despite it’s problems, I think so… it asks some good questions about religion, it imparts a healthy skepticism of authority, and it has some amazing dark humor in it (the bit where Philip Castle shows Julian all the people in the hospital dying of bubonic plague and says, “Son, someday this will all be yours”). The concept of ice-nine is good because it’s plausible yet easy to understand. There are some good meditations on the ugliness of war and humankind’s hubris.
However, I think we should keep in mind who is excluded from full personhood in Kurt Vonnegut’s fictional environment. I think we should allow encountering limited outsider perspectives on marginalized groups such as those in this book to motivate us to seek out insider perspectives from members of those marginalized groups. For instance, books by women in science or books by Native Americans. I’m glad I encountered Vonnegut’s mistake about the ghost dance movement in the graduation speech because it led to me learning a truth I didn’t know before (though casual readers who aren’t researching and writing about it probably wouldn’t have picked up on it and in that sense it’s potentially damaging).
I don’t think Cat’s Cradle should be assigned reading because of the sexism, racism, ableism, and sexual assault, but I think it should be in high school libraries because it’s a great book.
However, a shallow reading of Cat’s Cradle could impart some damaging messages. If you take the ending literally, you could come away thinking that religion is stupid and the only solution to existential angst is suicide. The first time I did take it that way because I was an edgy teenager tired of being told everything is going to be okay.
The second time I read it, before starting to write this review, I realized Jonah didn’t literally kill himself with ice-nine while flipping off G-d, just that’s what Bokonon told him to do, but it’s left undefined whether he follows Bokonon’s instruction.
The third time I read it, while writing this review, I was more aware of the fact that Bokonon tells his followers to commit suicide but doesn’t do it himself, and also that he’s upfront about his role as religious leader of telling people what they want to hear, not what’s true. Now I don’t think Bokonon actually wanted Jonah to do what he said, he was just giving him the sense of purpose that he expresses a desire for earlier. I think Bokonon wanted Jonah to see through his mystique as a religious leader and recognize him as just another human being, which might be similar to Vonnegut’s attitude, as he’s similarly ambivalent about wanting to be looked up to.
Cat’s Cradle has layers like an onion. There are more topics to discuss (like the role of fate and G-d, Bokononism’s similarity to religions like Taoism and Buddhism, and the real-life counterparts of San Lorenzo and Papa Monzano), but this post is already too long, so I’ll end it here. ‘Til next time!
Let me know what you think—do you like Cat’s Cradle? Have you read it? Do you want to read it? Or not?
Addendum: I’ll talk about fate and G-d a little bit…
Throughout the story, Jonah goes from one thing to the next without much reason connecting one event to the next other than that’s how it happens. This feels kind of realistic—stories have reasons connecting their events, but real life is more random. At the same time, Bokononists believe in fate and in a G-d that orchestrates that fate. However, that G-d doesn’t literally exist, they and fate are foma. The foma exist to soften the hard truth that everything is random and G-d doesn’t exist. But we can’t say for sure that everything is random and G-d doesn’t exist because we are only human and can’t experience for ourselves G-d’s existence or nonexistence. We don’t have access to the blueprints. Bokononism is a way of making peace with an agnostic reality.
When I first read Cat’s Cradle, I misunderstood karass as people you share interests with as opposed to granfalloon or people you share incidental similarities with (same school, town, race, etc). Karass is actually people connected by fate, people who become characters or influences in your life, for good or ill (ill like the guy who kills Jonah’s cat and turns him off of nihilism). Indianapolis is a granfalloon that connects Jonah with the Crosbys, but their experiences interacting with each other make them part of the same karass (actually, I don’t know if they are in Jonah’s karass? I don’t think it says in the book). Anyway, the karass is of course foma. It may or may not really exist but the concept helps give meaning to life.
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