Cat's Cradle

For the string game, see Cat's cradle.

For other uses see Cat's cradle (disambiguation).

Cat's Cradle

File:CatsCradle(1963).jpg First edition hardback cover
Author	Kurt Vonnegut
Original title	Cat's Cradle
Language	English
Genre	Satire, Science fiction novel
Publisher	Holt, Rinehart and Winston
Publication date	1963
Publication place	United States
Media type	Print (Hardcover & Paperback)
Pages	304
ISBN	ISBN 0-385-33348-X
OCLC	40067116

Cat's Cradle is a 1963 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. 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.

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, Newton Hoenikker.

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. Nobel Prize winner 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".

Plot

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, John becomes involved with the children of Felix Hoenikker, a fictional Nobel laureate physicist who helped develop the atomic bomb. John travels to Illium, New York to interview the Hoenikker children and others for his book. In Illium 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 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, 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 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 by the giant hook.

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 a US Marine deserter. 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.

At the time John arrives, the dictator is badly ailing, however, and states his intention to make Franklin Hoenikker his successor. Feeling guilty and afraid of the offer, the latter 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, in which the American embassador to San Lorenzo was going to speak, San Lorenzo's air force, which consists of a small number of donated planes was supposed to carry out a short air show. Unfortunately, one of the airplanes crashes into the dictator's seaside palace and 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. The book ends by his meeting a weary Bokonon, who is contemplating what the last words of The Books of Bokonon should be. There, John receives inspiration and takes on the act himself and the reader realizes he is planning to place it on Mt. McCabe as a "magnificent symbol" and then die.

Characters

Dr. Asa Breed: The supervisor of Felix Hoenikker. He takes the narrator, John, around Illium and to the Gerneral Forge and Foundry Company, where the late Felix worked. Later in the tour Dr. Breed becomes upset with John for "misunderstanding what a scientist is, what a scientist does."

'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. Only moments after creating it, Felix takes a nap in his rocking chair and dies. 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 giving birth to Newt Hoenniker. According to Dr. Asa Breed, the complications at Newt's birth were the result of a pelvic injury she sustained in a car accident some time before. Breed was a lover of Emily before she got married to Felix.

Franklin "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. He is an ultimate technical minded person, who is unable to make decisions except giving technical advise. His main hobby is building models.

Newton "Newt" Hoenikker: The midget son of famed scientist Felix Hoenikker, and a painter. He is the brother of both Frank and Angela Hoenikker. His main hobby is painting minimalist abstract works. He briefly had an affair with a Russian midget dancer named Zinka, who turned out to be a KGB agent, set to steal the ice-nine for the Soviet Union.

Angela Hoenikker Conners: 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. Conners. In contrast to her midget brother, Angela is described as a giantess, standing almost 7 feet tall. She used to take care of his father after her mother's death, and also she's acting as a kind of mother figure to Newt. She and her brothers all have samples of ice-nine, which they found along with their father's body, dead in his chair.

Bokonon: A co-founder of San Lorenzo (along with Earl 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. He is the adopted father of Mona Monzano.

Mona Aamons Monzano: The adopted daughter of "Papa" Monzano, who marries John before dying of Ice-Nine.

Julian Castle: The multi-millionaire ex-owner of Castle Sugar Cooperation, who John travels to San Lorenzo to interview. He abandoned his business ventures in order to set up and operate a humanitarian hospital in the jungle of San Lorenzo.

H. Lowe Crosby: A bicycle manufacturer who John meets on a plane to San Lorenzo. His main goal is to move his factory to San Lorenzo, so he could run it with cheap workforce.

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. His teacher, along with Mona, was Bokonon when they where young. Through index reading of Castles book, Claire Minton figures out that he's a homosexual.

Horlick Minton: The new American ambassador to San Lorenzo, who John meets on a plane. He was blacklisted as a Communist sympathizer during the McCarthy-era.

Claire Minton: The wife of the new American ambassador to San Lorenzo. Index writer.

Terms introduced in the novel

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.
• zah-mah-ki-bo - Inevitable destiny
• Borasisi and Pabu, the Sun and Moon; the binary trans-Neptunian object (66652) Borasisi and its moon (66652) Borasisi I Pabu now bear their names.JPL
  • 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.

References or Allusions

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.
• 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.

Awards and nominations

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

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.
• A calypso musical adaptation was presented by the Untitled Theater Company #61 in New York in 2008.
• 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.
• A straight theatrical adaptation of the book is being presented in Washington, DC in August and September of 2010 by Longacre Lea Productions.

In popular culture

• The band Ambrosia recorded a song called "Nice, Nice, Very Nice," which uses Bokonon's 53rd Calypso from Cat's Cradle as the lyrics.

• Rock guitar player Joe Satriani's composition "Ice 9" appeared on his album Surfing With the Alien.

• Canadian indie band Born Ruffians paid tribute to Vonnegut on their 2008 LP "Red, Yellow, and Blue", naming a song after the author, who had died the year previous. The song "Kurt Vonnegut" quotes verses from "The Books of Bokonon" and the original lyrics in the song reflect themes common to the author's work.

• Boston, MA based post-hardcore band Ice Nine Kills named their band after the deadly substance from the book.

• St. Petersburg, Florida based rock band Oceana has a song on their EP Clean Head entitled "Barracuda Capital of the World", a reference to the novel.

• In season two of the TV show Futurama episode 17 in the very beginning on the & 7-11 store window a sign reads "Free bag of Ice-9 with six pack"

• In the 2003 action thriller The Recruit, Al Pacino refers to a CIA designed software program code-named Ice-nine.

• The Grateful Dead named their music publishing company "Ice-Nine Publishing".

• The Canadian singer-songwriter Dan Mangan released an album in 2009 entitled "Nice, Nice, Very Nice", a reference to the 53rd Calypso from Cat's Cradle

• The Israeli Rock band "Kerach Tesha" derives its name from the hebrew translation of "Ice-Nine".

• Techno artist Matthew Dear named his third LP "Asa Breed" after Felix Hoenikker's supervisor in the novel.

External links

• Bokononism All of the text from Cat's Cradle which refers to Bokononism (including the Books of Bokonon).
• The Books of Bokonon online
• Excerpts from Cat's Cradle