Cat's Cradle
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- For other uses see Cat's cradle (disambiguation).
| Cat's Cradle | |
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.jpg) First edition hardback cover |
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| Author | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Original title | Cat's Cradle |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Satire, Science fiction novel |
| Publisher | Holt, Rinehart and Winston |
| Publication date | 1963 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover & Paperback) |
| Pages | 304 |
| ISBN | ISBN 0-385-33348-X |
| OCLC Number | 40067116 |
Cat's Cradle is a 1963 science fiction novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. It explores issues of science, technology, and religion, satirizing the arms race and many other targets along the way. After turning down his original thesis, the University of Chicago, in 1971, awarded Vonnegut his Master's degree in anthropology for Cat's Cradle.[1][2]
The title of the book derives from the string game "cat's cradle". Early in the book we learn that Felix Hoenikker (a fictional co-inventor of the atom bomb) was playing cat's cradle when the bomb was dropped, and the game is later referenced by his son.
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[edit] 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 in which their discoveries might be used. A man his brother worked with at GE, Nobel Prize winner Irving Langmuir, 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 whomever was around. But any truth he found was beautiful in its own right, and he didn’t give a damn who got it next".[3]
[edit] Plot summary
At the opening of the book, the narrator, an everyman named John (a.k.a. "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, Jonah becomes involved with the children of Felix Hoenikker, a fictional Nobel laureate physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. 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 is brought into contact with liquid water, it becomes a seed crystal that makes the molecules of liquid water arrange themselves into the solid form, ice-nine.
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 fictional 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, post modern 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 naked 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 those caught practising Bokononism are punished with death.
As the story progresses, it becomes clear that San Lorenzon society is even 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 an exiled American naval officer. The two men created Bokononism as part of a utopian project to control the population. The ban was simply 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 very rare.
John finds Felix Hoenikker's son, Frank, in San Lorenzo, where he has managed to obtain a high-ranking government position from the dictator in exchange for a piece of ice-nine. At the time Jonah arrives, the dictator is badly ailing, however, and states his intention to make Frank his successor. Feeling guilty and afraid of the offer, he abruptly hands the presidency to John, who begrudgingly accepts.
The dictator later uses ice-nine to commit suicide as he lies dying from inoperable cancer. Consistent with the properties of ice-nine, the dictator's corpse instantly turns into a block of solid ice at normal room temperature.
During John's inauguration festivities, an airplane crash into the dictator's seaside palace causes his still-frozen body to tumble into the ocean, after which all the water in the world's seas, rivers, and groundwater also turns into ice-nine, causing the death of almost all life forms in a matter of days.
John manages to escape with his wife, Mona. They later discover a mass grave where all the surviving San Lorenzans had killed themselves with ice-nine, on the facetious advice of Bokonon. Through 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, which is revealed to be the novel itself. He eventually decides to climb the tallest mountain on the island, and the books ends by his meeting on his way a weary and dying Bokonon, who hands him a paper with the last words of The Books of Bokonon.
[edit] Characters
The Narrator: A writer named John also known as Jonah who describes the events in the book with humorous sarcastic detail. It is when he is writing a book on the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki where he first becomes involved with the Hoenikker children. He begins the book by stating "Call me Jonah", alluding to the first line of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In a way, John and Ishmael, the narrator for Moby Dick, share the same traits as both a protagonist and a minor character at the same time.
Felix Hoenikker: The "Father of the Atom Bomb", Felix Hoenikker was proclaimed to be one of the smartest scientists on Earth. An eccentric, emotionless man, he is depicted as amoral and apathetic towards anything other than his research, just as long as he had something to keep him busy, as in his role as one of the "Fathers of the Atomic Bomb", and in his creation of "ice-nine", something he saw as a mental puzzle (a Marine general suggested developing a substance that could freeze and compact mud so soldiers could run across it more easily) which ends up destroying life on Earth. It is the narrator's quest for biographical details about Hoenikker that provides both the background and the connecting thread between the various subsections of the story.
Emily Hoenikker: The beautiful wife of Felix Hoenikker, who died during the birth of Newt from a pelvic injury.
Frank Hoenikker: The son of famed scientist Felix Hoenikker, and Major General of San Lorenzo. He is the brother of both Newt and Angela Hoenikker.
Newt Hoenikker: The midget son of famed scientist Felix Hoenikker, and a painter. He is the brother of both Frank and Angela Hoenikker.
Angela Hoenikker: The daughter of famed scientist Felix Hoenikker, and a clarinetist. She is the sister of both Frank and Newt Hoenikker and is married to Harrison C. Connors.
Bokonon: A co-founder of San Lorenzo (along with Edward McCabe) and creator of the religion of Bokononism, which he asked McCabe to outlaw. Born as Lionel Boyd Johnson.
Earl McCabe: A co-founder of San Lorenzo and a marine deserter, who ruled San Lorenzo for many years.
"Papa" Monzano: The ailing dictator of San Lorenzo who was the first human to die of Ice-Nine. He is the adopted father of Mona Monzano.
Mona Monzano: The adopted daughter of "Papa" Monzano, who marries John before dying of Ice-Nine.
Julian Castle: The multi-millionaire owner of Castle Sugar Cooperation, who John travels to San Lorenzo to interview.
H. Lowe Crosby: A bicycle manufacturer who John meets on a plane to San Lorenzo.
Hazel Crosby: The wife of H. Lowe Crosby, who asks all the Hoosiers she meets around the globe to call her "Mom".
Philip Castle: The son of Julian Castle, and the operator of the hotel Casa Mona on the island on San Lorenzo. He also writes a history of San Lorenzo that the narrator reads on his flight to the island.
Horlick Minton: The new American ambassador to San Lorenzo, who John meets on a plane.
Claire Minton: The wife of the new American ambassador to San Lorenzo.
[edit] Terms introduced in the novel
[edit] Terms of Bokononism
The religion of the people of San Lorenzo, called Bokononism, encompasses concepts unique to the novel, with San Lorenzan names such as:
- karass - a group of people who, often unknowingly, are working together to do God's will. The people can be thought of as fingers in a Cat's Cradle.
- duprass - a karass of only two people, who almost always die within a week of each other. The typical example is a loving couple who work together for a great purpose.
- granfalloon - a false karass; i.e., a group of people who imagine they have a connection that does not really exist. An example is "Hoosiers"; Hoosiers are people from Indiana, and Hoosiers have no true spiritual destiny in common, so really share little more than a name.
- wampeter - the central point of a karass
- foma - harmless untruths
- wrang-wrang - Someone who steers a Bokononist away from their line of perception. For example the narrator of the book is steered away from Nihilism when his Nihilist house sitter kills his cat and leaves his apartment in disrepair.
- kan-kan - An object or item that brings a person into their karass. The narrator states in the book that his kan-kan was the book he wrote about the Hiroshima bombing.
- sinookas - The intertwining "tendrils" of people's lives.
- vin-dit - a sudden shove in the direction of Bokononism
- saroon - to acquiesce to a vin-dit
- stuppa - a fogbound child (i.e. an idiot)
- duffle - the destiny of thousands of people placed on one "stuppa"
- sin-wat - a person who wants all of somebody's love for themself
- pool-pah - shit storm, but in some contexts: wrath of God
- Busy, busy, busy - words Bokononists whisper when they think about how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of life really is
- Now I will destroy the whole world - last words of a Bokononist before committing suicide
- boku-maru - the supreme act of worship of the Bokononists, which is an intimate act consisting of prolonged physical contact between the naked soles of the feet of two persons.
- Borasisi and Pabu, the Sun and Moon; the binary trans-Neptunian object (66652) Borasisi and its moon (66652) Borasisi I Pabu bear their names.†
- Borasisi, the Sun, held Pabu, the Moon, in his arms and hoped that Pabu would bear him a fiery child. But poor Pabu gave birth to children that were cold, that did not burn...Then poor Pabu herself was cast away, and she went to live with her favorite child, which was Earth.
[edit] References or Allusions
[edit] References to actual history, geography and current science
- Irving Langmuir came up with the idea of ice-nine as a way to entertain H.G. Wells who visited Schenectady in the 1930s.[4]
- The behavior of prions, infectious agents that propagate by transmitting a mis-folded protein state, and which are believed to be responsible for mad cow disease, has been compared to the behavior of ice-nine.
- A few years after the publication of Cat's Cradle, Soviet scientists announced the discovery of polywater, a substance that seemed eerily similar to ice-nine. The fervor around polywater lasted a few years but subsided when the initial results were shown to have been caused by impurities.
- The town of Ilium alludes to the town of Troy, NY (Ilium being the Roman city at the location at which Troy had stood). However, it is largely based on Schenectady, NY, where Vonnegut worked as a publicity man for General Electric after World War II. The locale appears in many of Vonnegut's works, such as in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater as the hometown of Kilgore Trout.
[edit] Awards and nominations
Cat's Cradle was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
- The book has been optioned by Leonardo DiCaprio's production company, Appian Way Productions. James V. Hart, screenwriter for the film Contact and his son Jake Hart have been linked to the developing script.[5]
- A calypso musical adaptation was presented by the Untitled Theater Company #61 in New York in 2008.[6]
- Vonnegut collaborated with US composer Dave Soldier for a CD titled Ice-9 Ballads, featuring nine songs with lyrics taken from Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut narrated his lyrics to Soldier's music.[7]
- Ice 9 from Cats Cradle was also featured in the 2003 movie, The Recruit.
[edit] References
- ^ Katz, Joe (April 13, 2007). "Alumnus Vonnegut dead at 84". Chicago Maroon. http://maroon.uchicago.edu/online_edition/news/2007/04/13/alumnus-vonnegut-dead-at-84/. Retrieved 2007-04-17.
- ^ David Hayman, David Michaelis, George Plimpton, Richard Rhodes, "The Art of Fiction No. 64: Kurt Vonnegut", Paris Review, Issue 69, Spring 1977
- ^ Musil, Robert K. (1980-08-02). "There Must Be More to Love Than Death: A Conversation With Kurt Vonnegut". The Nation 231 (4): 128–132. ISSN 00278378.
- ^ McGinnis, Wayne D. (November 1974). "The Source And Implications Of Ice-Nine In Vonneguts Cat'S Cradle". American Notes & Queries 13 (3): 40. ISSN 00030171.
- ^ "NAMES & FACES". Washington Post. 2005-07-10;. pp. D03. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/07/09/AR2005070901414_2.html. Retrieved 2008-05-17.
- ^ "Cat's Cradle, a calypso musical based on the book by Kurt Vonnegut". http://www.untitledtheater.com/pages/productions/cats-cradle/cats-cradle.html. Retrieved 2008-05-17.
- ^ Mulatta Records, MUL018
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Cat's Cradle |
- Bokononism All of the text from Cat's Cradle which refers to Bokononism (including the Books of Bokonon).
- The Books of Bokonon online
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