Kurt Vonnegut Jr.'s Cat's Cradle
In the early sixties, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. released his candidly fantastical novel, Cat's Cradle. Within the text an entire religious sect, called Bokononism is born; a religion built on lies, absurdity, and irony. The narrator of Cat's Cradle is Jonah, a freelance writer who characterizes Bokononism as being, "free form as an amoeba" (Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 3). It is boundless and unpredictable as the unconscious itself. Bokonon lives on the impoverished island of San Lorenzo where he spends his days scribing poetic calypsos in the books of Bokonon. Jonah arrives on the same island in his pursuit of Frank Hoenniker, the military commander and son of the eccentric Dr. Hoenniker, who invents a substance capable of freezing the world over in seconds called ice-nine. When San Lorenzo's totalitarian ruler, Papa Monzano, passes away—infecting the oceans with ice-nine in the process—Frank transfers his inherited power to Jonah. Even within this skeletal sketch of the novel, one can see that the absurdity and humor within the religion of Bokonon is imposed on the plot itself, creating a world of comedic fantasy in which the reading audience can partake. In light of this, Cat's Cradle exemplifies imagination and play, thus correlating with the theory Freud illustrates in the essay "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," which emphasizes the importance of fantasy to the creative writer and its therapeutic value for the audience.
At the most fundamental level, even the title of the novel provides a strong example of the importance of play to Vonnegut. Cat's cradle is a childrenÕs game of weaving yarn between the fingers whereby the player forms various patterns. To see beyond what exists (or in Vonnegut's w...
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...ite poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who. (Vonnegut, Cat's Cradle, 287)
Bokononism's refreshing defiance of restraint and reality with the creative power of playful imagination is a precise illumination of the therapeutic value Freud christens as inherent in literature.
Works Cited
Freud, Sigmund. "Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming." Freud Reader, Edited by Peter Gay. New York, NY: Norton and Company Inc., 1989.
Freud, Sigmund. "On Dreams." Freud Reader, Edited by Peter Gay. New York, NY: Norton and Company Inc., 1989.
Vonnegut, Kurt. A Man without a Country. New York, NY: Seven Stories Press, 2005.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle. New York, NY: Delta Books, 1963.
Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York, NY: Random House, 1969.
...a bunch of X's between somebody's hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's ... No damn cat, no damn cradle.”(Vonnegut, 105) In Cat’s Cradle Vonnegut critiques the many institutions and dogmas that we hold close to our heart. Vonnegut proposes the idea that the human life lacks purpose and any attempt to acquiring knowledge is futile because as he wrote in the story there’s “No damn cat, no damn cradle”(Vonnegut, 105) meaning there is no truth. In Vonnegut’s satire, Cat’s Cradle he closely examines the conventions of religious dogmas and the search for the truth through science. Vonnegut’s core satire in the book is the Bokononism , religion accepted by the citizens of San Lorenzo regardless of it’s self-acknowledged lies. Today science is seen as the key to progress but Vonnegut dismisses that notion and displays it’s dangerous repercussions.
Kurt Vonnegut's apocalyptic novel, Cat's Cradle, might well be called an intricate network of paradox and irony. It is with such irony and paradox that Vonnegut himself describes his work as "poisoning minds with humanity...to encourage them to make a better world" (The Vonnegut Statement 107). In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut does not tie his co-mingled plots into easy to digest bites as the short chapter structure of his story implies. Rather, he implores his reader to resolve the paradoxes and ironies of Cat's Cradle by simply allowing them to exist. By drawing our attention to the paradoxical nature of life, Vonnegut releases the reader from the necessity of creating meaning into a realm of infinite possibility. It appears that Vonnegut sees the impulse toward making a better world as fundamental to the human spirit; that when the obstacle of meaning is removed the reader, he supposes, will naturally improve the world.
One of the best, most valuable aspects of reading multiple works by the same author is getting to know the author as a person. People don't identify with Gregor Samsa; they identify with Kafka. Witness the love exhibited by the many fans of Hemingway, a love for both the texts and the drama of the man. It's like that for me with Kurt Vonnegut, but it strikes me that he pulls it off in an entirely different way.
Kurt Vonnegut, critically acclaimed author of several best-selling novels, uses self-expression and psychological manipulation to stress to the reader his beliefs and ideas dispersed within the context of Cat's Cradle. From reading this novel, one might attribute perplexity pondering over the plot and general story line of the book. Cat's Cradle entangles itself in many interesting changes of events; strange outlandish ideas and psychological "black holes" can be found with just the flip of a page.
Freud, Sigmund. The Future of an Illusion. New York: Norton & Company Inc., 1961. Print.
I believe that Vonnegut uses Cat's Cradle as an allegorical tale about what will happen to the world if we are not careful with technology that has the ability to end life on this planet. He points out one of the qualities of humanity; that people make mistakes, thus poisoning our minds and encouraging a better world.
Milan Kundera contends, “A novel that does not discover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral” (3). In this it is seen that the primary utility of the novel lies in its ability to explore an array of possible existences. For these possible existences to tell us something of our actual existence, they need to be populated by living beings that are both as whole, and as flawed, as those in the real world. To achieve this the author must become the object he writes of. J.M. Coetzee states, “there is no limit to the extent to which we can think ourselves into the being of another. There are no bounds to the sympathetic imagination” (35). Through this sympathetic faculty, a writer is able to give flesh, authenticity and a genuine perspective to the imagined. It is only in this manner that the goal of creating living beings may be realized. Anything short of this becomes an exercise in image and in Kundera’s words, produces an immoral novel (3).
This Bokonism is basically telling the religious believer that everything that they read or hear is a lie, and that they need to think for themselves. I think one of the greatest parts that shows black humor is on page 77, where Bokonon (like Adam) arrives on land, completely naked, and has a revelation. "A fish pitched up By the angry sea, I gasped on land, And I became me."
In 1900 , an Austrian psychologist Sigmund Freud produced a work entitled The Interpretation of Dreams, reviewing the idea that dreams allow psychic examination, that the dreams that are happening contain some sort of psychological meaning which can be brought on by interpretation. Freud says that every dream will release itself as a emotional structure, full of importance, and one which may be assigned to a designated place in the psychic activities. According to Freud's original thoughts dreams have two contents, a manifest content which is the dream that one actually experiences and a hidden content which is the meaning of the dream as discovered by interpretation.
"Dream Moods: Dream Theories: Sigmund Freud." Dream Moods: Dream Theories: Sigmund Freud. N.p., n.d. Web. 24 Nov. 2013. .
Psychoanalysis is the method of psychological therapy originated by Sigmund Freud in which free association, dream interpretation, and analysis of resistance and transference are used to explore repressed or unconscious impulses, anxieties, and internal conflicts (“Psychoanalysis”). This transfers to analyzing writing in order to obtain a meaning behind the text. There are two types of people who read stories and articles. The first type attempts to understand the plot or topic while the second type reads to understand the meaning behind the text. Baldick is the second type who analyzes everything. Since his article, “Allure, Authority and Psychoanalysis” discusses the meaning behind everything that happens in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” we can also examine “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” in the same manner.
Wilson, K. (2005). Introduction to Sigmund Freud’s Theory on Dreams. Retrieved November 4, 2013, from http://dreams.insomnium.co.uk/dream-theory/introduction-freud-theory-on-dreams
Sigmund Freud believed that a persons dreams fulfilled wishes and gave that person a sense of accomplishment to something they may not have been able to achieve.
Cartwright, R.D. (1978) A primer on Sleep and Dreaming. Massachusetts : Addison - Wesley, Publishing, Company
Many believe, “dreams are a series of images, ideas, emotions, and sensations that occur in the mind during certain stages of sleep” (Braden, 1). According to Freud, he claims that dreams are a series of events and images that are perceived through the mind during sleep (McLeish, 2). He said, “If you want to learn about an individual you could do so by interpreting their dreams” (McLeish, 5). For instance, Freud thinks a person expresses themselves through their dreams. Unlike Freud, “Jung’s depiction of dreams concentrated on symbolic imagery” (Jacobson, 3). He believed differently. He believes an individual’s dream do not distinguish the true meaning of the individual (Jacobson, 3). In other words, Jung thinks a person can dream about anything, and it will mean nothing (Jacobson, 3). Instead, he believes dreams have many different meanings and that they do not interpret ideas (McLeish, 3). He sees dreams like a series of events. Freud disagrees because he believes it is the individual’s character and self-creating the imaginations (Jacobson, 3). In other words, Freud develops a theory that dreams come from the individual’s thoughts and personality, and Jung develops a theory that dreams are just symbolic imagery and have no true