This is the Bokononist term for a fake karass. That is, it denotes a grouping of people together that feels significant but is in fact meaningless in the grander scheme of things.
Granfalloon Quotes in Cat’s Cradle
The Cat’s Cradle quotes below are all either spoken by Granfalloon or refer to Granfalloon. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 42
Quotes
“Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, ‘You call me Mom.’”
“Uh huh.”
“Let me hear you say it,” she urged.
“Mom?”
She smiled and let go of my arm. Some piece of clockwork had completed its cycle. My calling Hazel “Mom” had shut it off, and now Hazel was rewinding it for the next Hoosier to come along.
Hazel’s obsession with Hoosiers around the world was a textbook example of a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done, a textbook example of what Bokonon calls a granfalloon.
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Granfalloon Term Timeline in Cat’s Cradle
The timeline below shows where the term Granfalloon appears in Cat’s Cradle. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 42. Bicycles for Afghanistan
...both “Hoosiers.” She tells him to call him “Mom.” Present-day John introduces the Bokononist term, “granfalloon”—“a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the was God...
(full context)
