Cat's Cradle by kurt vonnegut jr.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

A metaphor of human nature the good the bad and the funny as only Kurt Vonnegut could write , and we happily the readers benefit. Ostensibly the story of a late scientist the builder of the nuclear bomb ( think of Oppenheimer) an eccentric genius in the extreme and his three peculiar children . Felix Hoenikker "Father of the Atom Bomb" and the destroyer of worlds, he lives in a different planet certainly. Sons Newton a dwarf he paints , Franklin older brother a tinker, Major General in a tiny Caribbean island (think Haiti) the poorest nation in the Americas and daughter Angela who becomes acting mother when their real one died, she being the senior child. The busy maker of weapons neglects his offspring....to be honest not a loving parent. Years later, quite a few having passed since the demise of Dr.Hoenikker ... a family reunion in the impoverished isle of San Lorenzo where Franklin is major-domo to dictator Papa Monzano ancient , ailing, delusional, rather sad. The real main character call him Jonah (John) yes of course shades of Moby Dick...nothing else, he the obscure starts writing a bio of the great man and family. Bokononism the humorous religion of the country, how so? Two faithful rubbing their bare feet together will make them feel close spiritually. Later disaster strikes the land, and the island suffers and death becomes common with situations that to the superstitious citizens there, are ordinary . Is this the end of Earth? Hope not I have many other books to read. The apparent black comedy is not this but a satire of modern life and all its absurdities. But first weird scenes commence as any novel of Mr. Vonnegut would, it couldn't be otherwise than ridiculous...Bizarre and ultimately.. very amusing and laughter erupts...his writing style is well known and loved. Many think this a silly farcical story, but some who look underneath will discover the meaning. Just scratch the surface and a new vision of this material becomes a secret no more. Maybe not of life but enough to enjoy the pleasures of it. Possibly the author's best , still who can say for the unique works are hard to judge... how do you measure the funny bone?

0 0 Reply

RagingAsianGuy

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I've read this book four times. It's better than the Bible, because unlike the Bible, this book knows it's fiction.

0 0 Reply

Havoctheend

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I stopped at page 175 and I have NEVER done that. I never give up on books I start. This book made me re-think that practice. Normally, even if I do not like a book, I can find something about it to keep me going but with Cat's Cradle I just had to quit. I need to feel something - curiousity, irritation, sadness, happiness, love, desire, anger, escapism, like I am learning something new, that I need the lesson this book is offering... whatever. I need to connect to the book, the story, the characters in some way. With this book I felt nothing, nada, eh. It was easy reading for sure but it seemed almost like it was a joke. It reminded me of my junior high schools days when the teacher asked us to write stories and read them to the class. You wrote hollow silly things that you thought sounded clever and exciting and then years later when you come across the story in a box of keepsakes you laugh at how stilted and basic it was. I know, Vonnegut is suppose to be speaking to the issues of religion, science, humanity with irony and humour - lots of people love this book. I did not care about any of it, not even the Ice Nine that probably destroyed the world (I don't know because I didn't finish the book) I decided that to continue would be a waste of life essence. The good thing I can say about this experience is that it made me realize that I don't have to finish a book.

0 0 Reply

Valentine07

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I loved this book!

It turned out to be one of those easy-to-read stories that leave you thinking, and thinking, and thinking. The science fiction aspect of the plot is not important at all. It is the impact of power, knowledge and ritual on every single individual that made me want to restart reading it as soon as I finished. I absolutely adore the creation of Bokononism and the development of a new language to suit the needs of the religion-in-the-making.

Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam experiments with the same kind of post-apocalyptic scenario and the never-ending question of what humanity needs to survive. Of course Vonnegut's vision is a lot darker than Atwood's. Humanity wiped out completely on a whim, no hope of reproducing our species at all, the only question remaining is how to die and what symbol to carry in your hand to show the hated - and hating - creator above.

The experience of being trapped in Dresden as an American prisoner of war during the bombing and destruction of the city might have formed the sense of absurdity that Vonnegut displays in his vision of mankind.

To put it in Bokononist words: the cruel paradox of the heartbreaking necessity of lying about reality combined with the heartbreaking impossibility of lying about it is at the center of the book. Foma!

0 0 Reply

galadriel_832

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

I've read Cat's Cradle about four or five times now, but it's been several years, so I felt it was time for a refresher. It's still one of my favorites of Vonnegut's, and I took something new from it this time. This was from early in his career, so he's not compltelely jaded yet (or at least this story doesn't read like he is). He's got some clear thoughts on religion and both its usefulness and uselessness. Bokononism defines itself as a "pack of lies" but then goes into great detail to describe those lies, many of which contain certain truths about both the futility and beauty of life.

I won't claim to know if God exists or not. When I first read this book in my early 20s, I had an arrogant opinion that He absolutely doesn't. But now that I'm older, and much less sure of myself or anything else, I don't read this book and grin knowingly at the parts that make fun of Christianity and organized religion in general. Instead, I find more humor and truth in the realization that, even if it is all lies, it's the best some folks have. Despite the fact that Bokononism is a completely made up religion, it's still the best thing in the lives of its impoverished, hopeless, futureless followers.

We delude ourselves about so much on a daily basis, why not a religion as well? If being a follower of Christ, Buddha, Mohammed, or Bokonon brings enlightenment to a person and brightens their lives, fills it with hope and peace and love, who cares if it's all a sham? Good fiction is supposed to make you think, right?

0 0 Reply

IDKMike

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Think what a paradise this world would be if men were kind and wise.

In 1963, when this book first came out, the world was still unclenching after the Cuban Missile Crisis. The nervy terror beneath the posturing of the Cold War is writ large here, and in cartoon colours; indeed the very name of the Cold War finds a deadly literality in Vonnegut's ‘ice-nine’, the chemical compound that will destroy all life on earth. Vonnegut's tone – a desperate hilarity which, I think, reflects real fear – has something in it that reminded me of Tom Lehrer's nuclear anthem ‘We Will All Go Together When We Go’ of a few years later:

And we will all go together when we go!
What a comforting fact that is to know!
Universal bereavement,
An inspiring achievement!
Yes, we all will go together when we go!

Vonnegut's apocalyptic outlook is saved from the taint of adolescent cynicism because of his constant reminders that things could be so much better. There's a melancholy utopianism in his worldview, which is represented, in Cat's Cradle, by the Caribbean religion of Bokononism. Unlike most religions, Bokononism is up-front about its fictional nature: honesty, for Vonnegut, is the quickest path to wisdom, however uncomfortable, and the extracts from Bokononist teachings are among the most appealing parts of his story.

‘Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything.’

It took me a while to warm up to Cat's Cradle. Vonnegut's approach is broadbrush, his language basic (though there are some nice lines – we hear that one character ‘ran to the heart of the house in the brainless ecstasy of a volunteer fireman’). The cast is made up of cut-out stock figures, including the brash American abroad, the high-minded impersonal scientist, the fat third-world dictator, the teenage hula-girl sex object. But in the second half of the (short) book, with everyone brought together on a remote fictional island, these elements start to combine in surprisingly powerful ways. When you look back on the book, this is the bit you remember: cartoon characters on an island, swapping religious parables and making jokes about imminent extinction. I suspect people who read this some years ago have forgotten the whole first half in New York – I suspect this because I read it a couple of days ago, and that bit's already hazy to me.

And the ending is so memorable because, despite the slapstick, it is deadly serious. Maybe a few years, or even months ago, one could have enjoyed the story uncomplicatedly, but it's funny how these things come around again. In his introduction to the Penguin Modern Classics edition, Benjamin Kunkel meditates on the following Bokononist verses:

Duffle, in the Bokononist sense, is the destiny of thousands upon thousands of persons when placed in the hands of a stuppa. A stuppa is a fogbound child.

‘Even the silly coinages of Bokonon,’ Kunkel deadpans, ‘seem to have taken on, for Americans at least, a certain utility and precision.’ But – oh god! – he wrote this in 2008, under George W Bush – a poor leader, but a peerless statesman in comparison to the detestable thundercunt presently in office, who has turned a book that should be a period piece into a model of contemporary relevance. Vonnegut would have been disgusted, but wholly unsurprised.

0 0 Reply

Furlock_Gnomes

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Please take any Vonnegut book the furthest away from me as possible. I’ve been more than patient, wondering why I hated Slaughterhouse 5 so much, going over it with an “open mind” again, and now tried to read Cat’s Cradle. Honestly, it wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that his work makes me throw up.

This book has the same issues that I found in Slaughterhouse 5: a love for nonsensical humor that reflects the author’s superficial outlook on things disguised as profundity, and a stunning lack of imagination.

Aside from being a fraudster who poses as a deep philosopher, fundamentally, Vonnegut is a comedian, an entertainer. He is writing for the laughs, whether dark or not. And - with all respect for different tastes in comedy - I don’t like ANY of his jokes, any iota of his sense of humor, all that nonsense that seems to be nothing but page filler. At the end of almost every chapter I feel like: “So what? You’ve told me nothing, only a string of pointless dialogues.”

Attention! Here come the fans squealing: “Oh so you don’t understand him!!!” (and this is - in part - the sly-fox game that the author is playing). But no, no, no. Try Gene Wolfe for a difficult author to understand. Vonnegut is eminently easy to understand. Despite the fact that the book is posing as a “deep reflection” on science and ethics and the atomic bomb, all that Vonnegut actually SAYS about these topics could fill about two paragraphs.

So why write the rest of the book?

0 0 Reply

Groenboys

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

April 26,2025

Definitely very different than Slaughterhouse Five, and one of the most grim endings to a book ever, certainly from the perspective that this book is tagged as humour
People weren't his speciality - about the inventor of the atomic bomb

Nonsensical might be a appropriate monicker, even though war, McCarthyism, critique on Cold War American foreign policy, ethics of scientific progress and new age religion all form part of the heady mix that Cat's Cradle offers. I just didn't find the whole very funny nor very poignant.

The short chapters are rather distracting instead of helping one get faster into the book. Loosely it recounts the travails of a biographer of the inventor of the atomic bomb, who gets sucked into a Caribbean island dictatorship and a new kind of super weapon involving a compound called Ice-9.

There was a queer son of a bitch Thinks the main character about the inventor of the atom bomb, but in general there are little normal people in the whole book.
Terrible rhyming and simple songs accompany the reader, hallmarks of a new age religion.

Sometimes there is humor, like in this exchange:
Are you an American?
That happiness is mine.
Or in this deadpan assessment:
Some people got free furniture and some got bubonic plague, about a shipwreck where only wicker furniture and rats made it to shore of an island.
I also enjoyed this insult:
How does he know what’s important?
I can carve a better man out of a banana.

But in general I just wasn't captured sufficiently by the plot and narrative, and I found the fascination with a 18 year old by the main character, a divorced man who prides himself on having 53 women, more than a bit awkward.

Science is magic that works but the humor in this book just didn't cut it for me: despite the interesting themes the book felt disjointed and rambling to me.

0 0 Reply

Leave a Review

You must be logged in to rate and post a review. Register an account to get started.

Cat's Cradle

kurt vonnegut jr.

This edition

Bokonon

Angela Hoenikker

Emily Hoenikker

Frank Hoenikker

Newt Hoenikker

Papa Monzano

More editions

About the author

kurt vonnegut jr.

Readers also enjoyed

Community Reviews