Cat’s Cradle

Vonnegut outlines the way that humankind longs for meaning to its existence. Take, for example, Bokonon’s short poem: “Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; / Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ / Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; / Man got to tell himself that he understand.” It’s in human nature, suggests Vonnegut, to strive for understanding, and for humankind to tell itself grand narratives in order to give meaning to existence. But, for Vonnegut, these narratives are rendered worthless and absurd in light of the atrocities of the 20th century—in particular, his own experiences in witnessing the Dresden bombings of World War Two at first hand. In other words, progress is a myth. Dr. Asa Breed, Dr. Hoenikker’s old boss, is at one point reported as having said “'The trouble with the world [is that] people [are] still superstitious instead of scientific … If everybody would study science more, there wouldn't be all the trouble.” This is just one of the grand narratives that humankind tells itself: increase in knowledge equals the betterment of the human race. Vonnegut presents this as a false comfort—humans tell themselves tall tales in order to make life more liveable.

Just like these narratives, Vonnegut’s book has at its heart the question of what it means to be human. The difference is, Vonnegut is not interested in false comforts and prefers to use his black comedy to highlight human hypocrisy and self-delusion. Take, for example, the idea of morality and the way in which humankind thinks of itself as fundamentally “good.” Through one of the minor characters, Vonnegut satirizes the complexities and double-standards of morality. Dr. von Koenigswald, who works at the charity hospital on San Lorenzo, is a former Nazi officer who is atoning for his role in the Holocaust by trying to save an equivalent amount of lives to those he ended. This is more than just a dark joke on the author’s part—it satirizes the way in which humankind comforts itself with moral reasoning.

Vonnegut’s absurdist satire is perhaps best exemplified by the symbol of the cat’s cradle itself. The cat’s cradle is a game played with string, one of the oldest games in human history. Dr. Hoenikker reportedly played it on the day the atomic bomb was dropped—as opposed to expressing emotion about all of the people his invention had just killed. The cat’s cradle represents humanity’s capacity for complexity, mimicking the human effort to make sense of existence. But, as Newt, Dr. Hoenikker’s youngest son, points out, there is no cat, and there is no cradle—it’s just string. That is, humans can make games out of string—or atomic bombs; they can make the world more complex, but this does not equate to a grand arc of progress. Just like imagining the string to be a cat’s cradle, believing the human race to be on an upward trajectory represents a trick of the mind. Vonnegut, then, takes great issue with the notion that humankind is “improving” as time goes on—it is changing rapidly, but this does not diminish its capability for cruelty or stupidity.

Another key way in which Vonnegut uses the absurd to deflate notions of the “meaningfulness” of human civilization is in the set-up of the book itself. Cat’s Cradle can be thought of as an eschatological book—that is, one that is specifically about the end of the world. By foregrounding the fact of death—and humankind’s ability to force death upon its own people—Vonnegut shows the human search for meaning to be fruitless and misguided. That isn’t to say that Vonnegut condemns all humanity. He gently advocates people treating each other with fairness and respect, saying that “it’s nice to be nice”—but makes the point that all of humankind’s attempts to make sense of the world and each other are undermined by its self-evident cruelty: “History! Read it and weep!” The eschatological nature of the book is integral because, as with the atom bomb, this end-of-times scenario is self-inflicted.

The narrator, John, writes Cat’s Cradle retrospectively, after the cataclysmic release of ice-nine on San Lorenzo has frozen the world’s water and caused great storms to appear in the sky. These, combined with the mass suicide of the island’s inhabitants, contribute to this sense of Armageddon. Though the above events happen at the end of the narrative, this apocalyptic feel is present in the way John writes from the very beginning. In fact, the book John originally planned to write (about the day the atomic bomb was dropped) was called The Day the World Ended. The end of humanity is thus confronted from the start of the book. This reflects the factual context that informs Vonnegut’s novel: the dropping of the atomic bomb. In this sense, the book is written in a world that has already ended—because this singularly destructive act (and the rest of WWII) completely punctured the illusion of humankind’s progressive civilization.

The ice-nine catastrophe at the end, then, is essentially the second ending of the world within the book’s pages. This seems to be suggesting that humankind is destined to repeat itself, finding ever new and innovative ways to do the same old thing: destroy. Though the world hasn’t quite been destroyed yet, humankind’s true “progress” is in making that scenario more possible. Human activity, then, is ultimately portrayed as inherently absurd, and contradictory to the meaning the human race constructs for itself—people can make cities of great complexity, artworks of great mastery, do anything—but eventually humankind will wreak destruction itself again.