Kurt Vonnegut’s Novel Cat’s Cradle

In the fraudulent words of the prophet Bokonon, “God made mud. God got lonesome. So God said to some of the mud, ‘Sit up!’” (Vonnegut 220). Thus, the creation of man. Unfortunately for all the mud, some of the mud decided that the only thing missing in life was a way to end it. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle takes a satirical look at the shortsightedness and hubris in man’s approach to new technology. In the novel, one of the designers of the bomb that fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, invents a way for military commanders to solidify muddy battlefields into a hard surface, perfect for crossings by tanks and soldiers. The material Dr. Hoenikker creates, ice-nine, causes any water it comes in contact with to instantly freeze at abnormally high temperatures. A single crystal in a body of water catalyzes an immediate transformation to an icy dead zone.

While Dr. Hoenikker had no intention of releasing ice-nine into the world, his children quickly find a way to get it into the hands of a dictator affectionately named “Papa” Monzano, ruler of an abjectly poor island nation called San Lorenzo. The island’s inhabitants believe in a peculiar religion developed by the aforementioned Bokonon, who resides on the island. Despite knowing full well that their beliefs are based upon lies, or foma in the local patois, the people, and eventually the narrator, consider themselves to be practitioners of Bokononism. With incurable, end-stage cancer, the dictator of San Lorenzo ingests ice-nine and is immediately turned to ice. In a series of unfortunate events, his body falls into the sea and begins the transformation of all water into ice-nine. In mere days, the entire world is frozen and life begins its inexorable slide tow...

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...the mysteries of our universe, but it also has the potential for cataclysmic ruin. As Bokonon says, we are only mud, but we still have the power, and possibly the will, to destroy everything. With technological progress effectively unstoppable, the only thing that we as a world can do is hope that dangerous technology is treated with the respect it deserves. Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle outlines only the danger that an innocently ignorant person can deal to life on Earth but he fails to acknowledge the willfully ignorant who believe they are doing what is right. While this point does not completely invalidate Vonnegut’s argument, it does provide a counterpoint that must be acknowledged by the scientific community as newer and more dangerous ideas are turned into reality.

Works Cited

Vonnegut, Kurt. Cat's Cradle: A Novel. 15th ed. Dell Publishing, 1998. Print.