Cat's Cradle

Plot

At the opening of the book, the narrator, an everyman named John (but calling himself Jonah), describes a time when he was planning to write a book about what important Americans did on the day Hiroshima was bombed. While researching this topic, John becomes involved with the children of Felix Hoenikker, a Nobel laureate physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. John travels to Ilium, New York, to interview the Hoenikker children and others for his book. In Ilium John meets, among others, Dr. Asa Breed, who was the supervisor "on paper" of Felix Hoenikker. As the novel progresses, John learns of a substance called ice-nine, created by the late Hoenikker and now secretly in the possession of his children. Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature. When a crystal of ice-nine contacts liquid water, it becomes a seed crystal that makes the molecules of liquid water arrange themselves into the solid form, ice-nine. Felix Hoenikker's reason to create this substance was to aid in the military's plight of wading through mud and swamp areas while fighting. That is, if ice-nine could reduce the wetness of the areas to a solid form, soldiers could easily maneuver across without becoming entrapped or slowed.

John and the Hoenikker children eventually end up on the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, one of the poorest countries on Earth, where the people speak a barely comprehensible creole of English (for example "twinkle, twinkle, little star" is rendered "Tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store"). It is ruled by the dictator, "Papa" Monzano, who threatens all opposition with impalement on a giant hook.

San Lorenzo has an unusual culture and history, which John learns about while studying a guidebook lent to him by the newly appointed US ambassador to the country. He learns about an influential religious movement in San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, a strange, postmodern faith that combines irreverent, nihilistic, and cynical observations about life and God's will with odd, but peaceful rituals (for instance, the supreme act of worship is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the bare soles of the feet of two persons, supposed to result in peace and joy between the two communicants). Though everyone on the island seems to know much about Bokononism and its founder, Bokonon, the present government calls itself Christian and practicing Bokononism is punishable by death on "the hook."

As the story progresses, it becomes clear that San Lorenzo society is more bizarre and cryptic than originally revealed. In observing the interconnected lives of some of the island's most influential residents, John learns that Bokonon himself was at one point a de facto ruler of the island, along with a US Marine deserter. The two men created Bokononism as part of a utopian project to control the population. The ban was an attempt to give the religion a sense of forbidden glamour, and it is found that almost all of the residents of San Lorenzo, including the dictator, practice the faith, and executions are rare.

When John and the other travelers arrive on the island, they are greeted by President "Papa" Monzano, his adopted daughter Mona, and around five-thousand San Lorenzans. It becomes clear that "Papa" Monzano is extremely ill, and he intends to name Franklin Hoenikker his successor. Franklin, who finds it hard to talk with people, is uncomfortable with this arrangement, abruptly hands the presidency to John, who grudgingly accepts. Franklin also suggests that John should marry Mona.

The dictator later uses ice-nine to commit suicide rather than succumb to his inoperable cancer. Consistent with the properties of ice-nine, the dictator's corpse instantly turns into solid ice at room temperature. This is followed by the freezing of Dr Schlichter von Koenigswald, "Papa" Monzano's doctor and a former S.S. Auschwitz physician, who accidentally ingests the ice-nine upon Monzano's examination.

John and the Hoenikkers plan to gather the bodies of both Monzano and his physician in order to ritualistically burn them on a funeral pyre, thereby eliminating the traces of ice-nine. They also systematically cleanse the room with various heating methods, taking the utmost care.

It is here where John inquires as to how the ice-nine came into Papa Monzano's possession. The Hoenikkers explain that when they were young, their father would riddle them with the concept of ice-nine. One day, they find their father has died taking a break from freezing and unfreezing ice-nine to test its properties. With the sweep of a cloth, Frank Hoenikker collects residual amounts of ice-nine from a cooking pan, as was the various collection and examination methods of their father when creating the substance. A dog licks the cloth and also instantly freezes. Witnessing this, the young Hoenikkers finally deduce the properties of ice-nine. They collectively cannot determine who had what part in gathering the ice-nine, but chunks of the substance were chipped from the cooking pan supply and placed in mason jars then later in thermoses. The Hoenikkers explain that this is how they had become fortunate throughout their lives, each one selling off the substance to various buyers.

During John's inauguration festivities, in which the American ambassador to San Lorenzo was going to speak, San Lorenzo's small air force was supposed to present a brief air show. One of the airplanes crashes into the dictator's seaside palace and causes his still-frozen body to tumble into the ocean, and all the water in the world's seas, rivers, and groundwater turns into ice-nine, killing almost all life in a few days.

John manages to escape with Mona to a secret bunker. They later discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans had killed themselves with ice-nine, on the facetious advice of Bokonon. Displaying a mix of grief and resigned amusement, Mona kills herself as well. John takes refuge with a few other survivors (an American couple he had met on the plane to San Lorenzo and Felix Hoenikker's two sons), and lives in a cave for several months, during which time he writes a memoir revealed to be the novel itself. The book ends by his meeting a weary Bokonon, who is contemplating what the last words of The Books of Bokonon should be. Bokonon states that if he were younger, he would have climbed to the top of Mt. McCabe, placed a book about human stupidity at the peak, and, through the administration of ice-nine, "make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who".

Major themes

Many of Vonnegut's recurring themes are prevalent in Cat's Cradle, most notably the issues of free will and man's relation to technology. The former is embodied in the creation of Bokononism, an artificial religion created to make life bearable to the beleaguered inhabitants of San Lorenzo through acceptance and delight in the inevitability of everything that happens. The latter is demonstrated by the development and exploitation of Ice-9, which is conceived with indifference but is misused to disastrous ends. In his 1969 address to the American Physical Society, Vonnegut describes the inspiration behind Ice-9 and its creator as the type of "old-fashioned scientist who isn't interested in people," and draws connections to nuclear weapons.

More topically, Cat's Cradle, takes the threat of nuclear destruction in the Cold War as a major theme. The Cuban Missile Crisis, in which world powers collided around a small Caribbean island, bringing the world to the brink of mutual assured destruction, occurred in 1962, and much of the novel can be seen as allegorical.

Style

Like most of Vonnegut's work, irony, black humor and parody are used heavily throughout. Cat's Cradle, despite its relatively short length, contains 127 discrete chapters. Vonnegut himself has claimed that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips...and each chip is a joke."

Background

After World War II, Kurt Vonnegut worked in the public relations department for the General Electric research company. GE hired scientists and let them do pure research, and his job was to interview these scientists and find good stories about their research. Vonnegut felt that the older scientists were indifferent about the ways their discoveries might be used. The Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, who worked with Vonnegut's older brother Bernard at GE, became the model for Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Vonnegut said in an interview with The Nation that "Langmuir was absolutely indifferent to the uses that might be made of the truths he dug out of the rock and handed out to whoever was around, but any truth he found was beautiful in its own right, and he didn’t give a damn who got it next."

Setting

The Republic of San Lorenzo is a fictional country where much of the book's second half takes place.

San Lorenzo is a tiny, rocky island nation located in the Caribbean Sea, positioned in the relative vicinity of Puerto Rico. San Lorenzo has only one city, its seaside capital of Bolivar. The country's form of government is a dictatorship, under the rule of ailing president "Papa" Monzano, who is a staunch ally of the United States and a fierce opponent of communism. No legislature exists. The infrastructure of San Lorenzo is described as being dilapidated, consisting of worn buildings, dirt roads, an impoverished populace, and having only one automobile taxi running in the entire country.

The language of San Lorenzo is a fictitious English-based creole language that is referred to as "the San Lorenzan dialect." The San Lorenzan national anthem is based on the tune of Home on the Range. Its flag consists of a U.S. Marine Corps corporal's chevrons on a blue field (presumably the flag was updated, since in the 1920s Marine Corps rank insignia did not include crossed rifles). Its currency is named corporals, at a rate of two corporals for every United States dollar; both the flag and the monetary unit are named after U.S. Marine Corporal Earl McCabe, who deserted his company while stationed at Port-au-Prince during the American occupation in 1922, and in transit to Miami, was shipwrecked on San Lorenzo. McCabe, along with accomplice Lionel Boyd Johnson from Tobago, together threw out the island's governing sugar company, and after a period of anarchy, proclaimed a republic.

San Lorenzo also has its own native religion, Bokononism, a religion based on enjoying life through its untruths. Bokononism, founded by McCabe's accomplice Boyd Johnson (pronounced "Bokonon" in San Lorenzan dialect), however, is outlawed – an idea Bokonon himself conceived for the purpose of spreading the religion and making the residents of the island happier. Bokononists are liable to be punished by being impaled on a hook, but Bokononism privately remains the dominant religion of nearly everyone on the island, including the leaders who outlaw it. Officially, however, San Lorenzo is a Christian nation.

Characters

Terms introduced in the novel

The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:

Reception

Theodore Sturgeon praised Cat's Cradle, describing its storyline as "appalling, hilarious, shocking, and infuriating," and concluded that "this is an annoying book and you must read it. And you better take it lightly, because if you don't you'll go off weeping and shoot yourself."

Awards and nominations

Cat's Cradle was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.

Film, television or theatrical adaptations