Book Review: Cat’s Cradle (Part II: Writing & Themes)

Kurt Vonnegut
1963
Nominations: Hugo
Rating: ★ ★ ★ ★ –

This post talks about Kurt Vonnegut’s writing and general themes in his work, particularly as used in Cat’s Cradle. For my synopsis of the plot of Cat’s Cradle, please see my last post.

Vonnegut's Style

Vonnegut’s style was very different from what most other authors were doing when he first started publishing novels in the 1950s and early 1960s.

His chapters are tiny—sometimes just a page or two. (Cat’s Cradle, for example, is less than 200 pages long and has 127 chapters.) The chapters also have a tendency to break right in the middle of a conversation or anecdote.

His writing is rapid-fire, hurtling through plot and character development at high speed. And he frequently punctuates his main narrative with side references and little bits of added information that seem totally out of left field but often come up later in unexpected ways. They are always funny without being overly clever. He constantly makes you wonder: how the hell did he think of that?

A clever writing style does not by itself make a person a great author, however. What made Kurt Vonnegut great were the subjects he dealt with, his willingness to lay himself on the line emotionally, and his drive to get to the truth, however painful. And how he tied it all together with a brilliantly dark sense of humor.

Vonnegut's History

Vonnegut did not have an easy early life, and much of his largely pessimistic and cynical outlook was undoubtedly formed by major traumas he experienced in his teens and twenties. He was born in 1922 and when he was still a young child, his parents were all but destroyed, economically and psychologically, by the Great Depression. His mother eventually ended up committing suicide shortly before he was sent off to World War II.

And the war itself was horrific for him, as the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s biography of the author describes:

When World War II broke out, Vonnegut was 16; at 20, he entered the army and was shipped off to Europe, where he almost immediately was captured by the Germans in the Battle of the Bulge.

He was sent as a POW to Dresden. On February 13, 1945, British and American bombers destroyed the city by dropping high explosives followed by incendiary bombs. The resulting firestorm turned the non-militarized city into an inferno that killed up to 60,000 civilians. Vonnegut and his fellow POWs survived by accident only because they were housed some 60 feet underground in a former meat locker and slaughterhouse.

Vonnegut’s job for weeks after the bombing was to gather up and burn the remains of the dead.

Dresden after the 1945 Firebombing

It is no wonder that Vonnegut wrote so much about the pain of war and the pointlessness of religion, business, and patriotic fervor. And it is no wonder that he was so sensitive to falseness, both large- and small-scale. Vonnegut spent much of his time in his writing trying to strip away artifice and to get to the truth.

Vonnegut's War

War is less of a central theme in Cat’s Cradle than in some of Vonnegut’s other novels, but it still rears its head in significant places.

First, of course, the narrator gets sucked into the San Lorenzan/ice-nine mess in the first place because he is writing a book about the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. He—along with Vonnegut, presumably—wants to know how the intelligentsia of America coped psychologically with what they had done to the people of Japan.

And the ceremony honoring San Lorenzo’s Hundred Martyrs to Democracy is a cynical and, at the same time, heartbreaking take on the hero-worship of soldiers who die in war.

The story of the Hundred Martyrs is that when World War II broke out, one hundred San Lorenzan men volunteered to fight. They all got onto a ship and took off for the war, but a U-boat sunk the ship and all one hundred soldiers died before it even got out of the harbor. Every year since then, San Lorenzo has held a ceremony to honor these heroes in which cardboard cutouts of world dictators are floated in the harbor and shot at by San Lorenzo’s six war planes.

After learning about the ridiculousness of both the martyrs’ deaths and the ceremony honoring them, we are prepared for total buffoonery at the ceremony itself. But instead we are forced to come face to face with the true awfulness of it all by the U.S. Ambassador to San Lorenzo, who says in his speech:

    “We are gathered here, friends,” to honor…children dead, all dead, all murdered in war. It is customary on days like this to call such lost children men. I am unable to call them men for this simple reason: that in the same war in which [these martyrs] died, my own son died.”
    “My soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.”
    “I do not say that children at war do not die like men, if they have to die. To their everlasting honor and our everlasting shame they do die like men, thus making possible the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.”
    “But they are murdered children all the same.”
    “And I propose to you that if we are to pay our sincere respects to the hundred lost children of San Lorenzo, that we might best spend the day despising what killed them; which is to say, the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.”

Vonnegut's Religion 

Religion is much more prevalent than war as a theme throughout Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut’s vehicle for talking about it is Bokonon, San Lorenzo’s local holy man, a former sailor and somewhat questionable figure who, after being marooned on the island, created his own irreverent and unholy religion.
   
The Books of Bokonon, which Vonnegut’s narrator John learns about on the flight to San Lorenzo, are a series of parables and lessons in the form of calypso songs. They tend to reflect on the ridiculousness of life and to send the message that the only thing that is really holy is humankind itself.

The General Electric Company Board

Bokonon teaches that everyone belongs to a karass: a group of people with whom you are cosmically connected and are fatalistically destined to do God’s will, whether you want to or not. He also teaches that people often try to create artificial karasses, which he calls granfalloons, which are groups that people think are significant but which really have zero meaning on a cosmic scale. Examples of granfalloons, groups that appear to be meaningful but which are not, are: the General Electric Company, Cornell alumni, and any country at all. 

Vonnegut's Truth

Vonnegut had a real distaste for falsehood—from the big lies told by churches, corporations, and countries to get people to do what they want, to the little white lies told by individual people to make themselves look and feel better.

On the large scale, Vonnegut's shredding of both war heroism and religion is an expression of his general struggle to cut through these lies. Through the stories of the Hundred Martyrs and the Books of Bokonon, Vonnegut shows us that much of what we revere is self-deception; we are desperate to feel like we are part of something big and important, so we construct institutions to convince ourselves that we are.

And on the small scale, his characters usually seem pretty normal at first but then, through seemingly innocuous conversations and throw-away remarks, piece by piece, he reveals their odd and often depressingly sad backstories. Supposedly happy marriages turn out to be shams; supposedly successful people turn out to feel like tremendous failures; supposedly tight-knit families turn out to be full of tension.

In fact, the people who openly admit from the start that they are liars—like Bokonon and Newton Hoenikker—end up being the only truly honest people in the book. Bokonon admits that everything he says is a lie—and therefore Bokononism is the only religion John feels he can believe in. And Newton illustrates the destructiveness of untruth with a story about how his father at one point became obsessed with cat’s cradle, the string game. His father kept waving the cat’s cradle in Newton's face and demanding that he pay show some interest. Newton explains how confusing this was for him as a child, and how this kind of thing would teach a kid to doubt what he sees:

    “One of the oldest games there is, cat’s cradle. Even the Eskimos know it.”
    “You don’t say.”
    “For maybe a hundred thousand years or more, grown-ups have been waving tangles of string in their children’s faces.”
    “Um.”
    Newt remained curled in the chair. He held out his painty hands as though a cat’s cradle were strung between them. “No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat’s cradle is nothing but a bunch of X’s between somebody’s hands, and little kids look and look at all those X’s…”
    “And?”
    “No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

And, indeed, for Vonnegut himself, the more blatant and ridiculous he is with his lies in his writing, the more believable he is. It is his mission to peel the onion, to strip away the false fronts his characters put on until we are left with the bare and painful but also honest and funny truth.

Cat's Cradle String Game

It is distressing, but it also feels right. It feels better to come to grips with the truth, however depressing, than to carry on the ridiculous and always even more pathetic lies people tell to cover it up.

Vonnegut's Humor

All of this is pretty heavy stuff, of course. But Vonnegut’s books are never too heavy to read because of his biting, sarcastic, cynical wit. His dark humor is present throughout all of his writing, from silly acronyms and funny names to the embarrassing ways people die and the tremendous effort people put into pointless tasks.

On the surface, his humor might make it seem like he is being flippant about really serious subjects. But his flippancy and his deadpan delivery actually make the serious issues even more horrifying than if he had tried to present them seriously.

Vonnegut could not look at life in anything other than a clear-headed, unvarnished way. This was a blessing for his readers but was probably a curse for him. Given the overwhelming depression that he experienced at times, it is amazing that he was able to create stories with such humor in addition to such insight. It is a measure of his genius that he was able to make us look directly at such difficult topics, and make us question our own assumptions and actions, and make us laugh while he was doing it.

From The First Book of Bokonon:

     In the beginning, God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness.

     And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done.” And God created every living creature that now moveth, and one was man. Mud as man alone could speak. God leaned close as mud as man sat up, looked around, and spoke. Man blinked. “What is the purpose of all this?” he asked politely.

     “Everything must have a purpose?” asked God.                                 

     “Certainly,” said man.

     “Then I leave it to you to think of one for all this,” said God. And He went away.