Cat's Cradle

Cat's Cradle is a satirical postmodern novel, with science fiction elements, by American writer Kurt Vonnegut. Vonnegut's fourth novel, it was first published on March 18, 1963, exploring and satirizing issues of science, technology, the purpose of religion, and the arms race, often through the use of morbid humor.
The first-person everyman narrator opens the novel with "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John", though neither name appears again throughout the novel. The narrator is a professional writer who frames the plot as a flashback set in the mid-20th century, when he was planning to write a book called The Day the World Ended. He describes his concept for that book as an account of what people were doing on the day of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Throughout, he also intersperses meaningful as well as sarcastic passages and sentiments from an odd religious scripture known as The Books of Bokonon. Most of the events of the novel occur before the narrator was converted to his current religion, Bokononism.
While researching for his upcoming book, the narrator writes a letter to Newt Hoenikker, the younger son of the late Felix Hoenikker, a co-creator of the atomic bomb and Nobel laureate physicist, asking Newt to describe what he remembers about the day when the first bomb was dropped. Newt recounts that his father was doing nothing more than playing the string game "cat's cradle". About a year later, the narrator travels to (fictional) Ilium, New York to interview Felix Hoenikker's coworkers and other acquaintances. There, he learns of a substance called ice-nine, conceptualised for military use by Hoenikker and currently in possession of his three adult children. Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water that is solid at room temperature and acts as a seed crystal upon contact with ordinary liquid water, causing that liquid water to instantly freeze and transform into more ice-nine.
Eventually, a magazine assignment takes the narrator to the (fictional) Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, one of the poorest countries on Earth. On the plane ride, the narrator is surprised to meet Newt and Angela, Felix's only daughter. He also meets the newly appointed US ambassador to San Lorenzo, who provides a comprehensive guidebook on San Lorenzo's unusual culture and history. The guidebook describes a locally influential semi-parody religious movement called Bokononism, which combines irreverent, nihilistic, and cynical observations about life and God's will; an emphasis on coincidences and serendipity; and both thoughtful and humorous sayings and rituals into a holy text called The Books of Bokonon. Bokonon, the religion's founder, was a former leader of the island who created Bokononism as part of a utopian project to give people purpose and community in the face of the island's unsolvable poverty and squalor. As a deliberate attempt to give Bokononism an alluring sense of forbidden glamor and hope, the religion is nominally outlawed, which forced Bokonon to live in "hiding" in the jungle. The current dictator, "Papa" Monzano, threatens all Bokononists with impalement on a large hook. Intrigued by Bokononism, the narrator later discovers the strange reality that nearly all residents of San Lorenzo, even including "Papa" Monzano himself, practice it in secret, and punishment by the hook is, in actuality, quite rare.
On San Lorenzo, the plane passengers are greeted by "Papa" Monzano, his beautiful adopted daughter Mona (whom the narrator intensely lusts after), and a crowd of some five thousand San Lorenzans. Monzano is ill from cancer and wants his successor to be Frank Hoenikker: Monzano's personal bodyguard and, coincidentally, Felix Hoenikker's other son. Frank achieved this position by giving "Papa" Monzano a piece of ice-nine. However, Frank, uncomfortable with leading, confronts the narrator in private and somewhat randomly offers him the presidency. Startled at first, the narrator grudgingly accepts after he is promised the beautiful Mona for his bride. Newt reiterates the idea of the cat's cradle, implying that the game, with its invisible cat, is an appropriate symbol for the meaninglessness of life. Soon after, the bedridden "Papa" Monzano commits suicide by swallowing ice-nine, whereupon his corpse instantly turns into solid ice-nine. Frank Hoenikker admits to giving Monzano ice-nine, and the Hoenikkers explain that when they were young their father would give them hints about the existence of ice-nine while experimenting with it in the kitchen. After their father's death, they gathered chunks of the substance into thermos flasks and have kept them ever since.
Festivities for the narrator's presidential inauguration begin, but during an air show performed by San Lorenzo's fighter planes, one of the planes malfunctions and crashes into the seaside palace, causing Monzano's still-frozen body to fall into the sea. Instantly, all the water in the world's seas, rivers, and groundwater transforms into solid ice-nine. The freezing of the world's oceans immediately causes violent tornadoes to ravage the Earth, but the narrator manages to escape with Mona to a secret bunker beneath the palace. When the initial storms subside after several days, they emerge. Exploring the island for survivors, they discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans committed suicide by touching ice-nine from the landscape to their mouths on the facetious advice of Bokonon, who has left a note of explanation. Displaying a mix of grief for her people and resigned amusement, Mona promptly follows suit and dies.
The horrified narrator is discovered by a few other survivors, including Newt and Frank Hoenikker, and he lives with them in a cave for several months, during which time he writes the contents of the book. Driving through the barren wasteland one day, he spots Bokonon himself, who is contemplating what the last words of The Books of Bokonon should be. Bokonon states that if he were younger, he would place a book about human stupidity on the peak of San Lorenzo's highest mountain, rest his head on it, swallow ice-nine, and die while thumbing his nose at God.
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-nine, 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-nine 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.
Like most of Vonnegut's work, irony, morbid humor, and parody are used heavily throughout. Cat's Cradle, despite its relatively short length, contains 127 discrete chapters, some of which are verses from the Book of Bokonon. Vonnegut himself claimed that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips... and each chip is a joke."
After World War II, Kurt Vonnegut worked in the public relations department for 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. When science fiction author H. G. Wells visited the labs in the 30s, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir suggested for him the idea of a story about a form of ice stable at room temperature. Wells never took it any further, but Vonnegut's older brother Bernard, who was Langmuir's junior colleague at GE, remembered and told him about it. After both the author and the scientist had died, Vonnegut thought to himself "Finders, keepers – the idea is mine". Langmuir himself would become 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." Dr. Felix Hoenikker's fictional invention of ice-nine was similar in name only to the real substance Ice IX, one of a number of variant structures for ice. Langmuir had worked on seeding ice crystals to diminish or increase rain or storms.
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 working automobile taxi in the entire country.
The language of San Lorenzo is a fictitious English-based creole language (for example "twinkle, twinkle, little star" is rendered "tsvent-kiul, tsvent-kiul, lett-pool store") 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 the corporal, 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 believing "foma" (harmless lies), and taking encouragement where you can. Bokononism, founded by McCabe's accomplice Boyd Johnson (pronounced "Bokonon" in San Lorenzan dialect), however, is outlawed – an idea Bokonon himself conceived, because forbidding the religion would only make it spread quicker. 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.
The semi-humorous religion secretly practiced by the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel. Many of these concepts use words from the San Lorenzan creole "dialect" of English. Assumed within the religion is the presence of God, who evidently works in mysterious ways. Many of its sacred texts, collectively called The Books of Bokonon, are written in the form of calypso songs. Bokononist rituals are equally strange or absurdist; for example, the supreme religious act consists of any two worshippers rubbing the bare soles of their feet together to inspire spiritual connection.
Bokononist terms include:
After The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Mother Night (1962) received favorable reviews and sold well in paperback, large publisher Holt, Rinehart, and Winston issued Cat's Cradle as a hardcover original. 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".
According to Indianapolis Monthly, "In 1972, the school board in Strongsville, Ohio, banned the book without stating an official reason. Notes from the meeting include references to the book as "completely sick" and "garbage". The ban was overturned in 1976." Additionally, the book was also challenged in 1982 at New Hampshire's Merrimack High School.
Cat's Cradle was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.