Vonnegut 2 Essay, Research Paper
Vonnegut, considered by many to be one of Americas foremost living authors, was himself a veteran of World War Two. He, as a prisoner of war, was one of the few survivors of the fire-bombing of Dresden. In Dresden he saw what many believe was a more horrible tragedy than Hiroshima. The allied bombs destroyed the entire city and killed as many people, if not more, than were killed in Hiroshima. He would eventually write about this experience in the semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five. This novel, like Cats Cradle, takes a very strong anti-war stance. But along with being an Anti-war book, Cats Cradle is an excellent satire of the Atomic Age. It is essentially the story of one man, an author by the name of John (or Jonah) and the research he is doing for a book on the day the bomb exploded in Hiroshima. This involves him with members of the Dr. Felix Hoenikker family+the genius who helped build the bomb+and their adventures.
In the book Vonnegut paints an imaginary world where things might not seem to make any Gioielli 5sense. But there is in fact an amazing amount of symbolism, as well as satire. Dr. Hoenikker is an extremely eccentric scientist who spends most of his time in the lab at his company. He is interested in very few things, his children not among them. His children are almost afraid of him. One of the few times he does try to play with his children is when he tries to teach the game of cats cradle to his youngest son, Newt. When he is trying to show newt the game Newt gets very confused. In the book, this is what Newt remembered of the incident:+And then he sang, +Rockabye catsy, in the tree top+;he sang, + when the wind blows, the cray-dull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.+
+I burst into tears. I jumped up and ran out of the house as fast as I could.+(18)What Newt doesn+t remember is what he said to his Father. Later in the book we find this out from Newts sister, Angela that newt jumped of his father+s lap screaming + No cat! No cradle! No cat! No cradle!+(53)
With this scene, Vonnegut is trying to show a couple of things. Dr. Hoenikker symbolizes all the scientists who created the atomic bomb. And the cats cradle is the world and all of humankind combined. Dr. Hoenikker is simply playing, like he has all his life, that game just happens to involve the fate of the rest of the world. And little Newt, having a childs un-blinded perception, doesn+t understand the game. He doesn+t see a cat or a cradle. Like all the games Dr. Hoenikker plays, including the ones with nuclear weapons, this one is mislabeled.
This is just one of the many episodes in the book that characterizes Dr. Hoenikker as a player of games. He recognizes this in himself when he gives his Nobel Prize speech:I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight year on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and wonder, and sometimes learn (17). And the Doctors farewell to the world is a game he has played, with himself. One day a Marine General asked him if he could make something that would eliminate mud, so that marines wouldn+t have to deal with mud anymore. So Dr. Hoenikker thinks up ice-nine, an imaginary substance that when it comes in contact with any other kind of water, it crystallizes it. And this crystallization spreads to all the water molecules this piece of water is in contact with. So to crystallize the mud in an entire armed division of marines, it would only take a minuscule amount of ice-nine. Dr. Gioielli 6Hoenikker s colleagues see this as just another example of his imagination at work. But he actually does create a small chink of ice-nine, and when he dies, each of his children get a small piece of it. They carry it around with themselves in thermos containers the rest of their lives. At the end of book one small piece of ice-nine gets out , by mere accident, and ends up crystallizing the whole world. The game Dr. Hoenikker was playing with himself destroyed the whole world. The accident that caused the ice-nine to get out could be much like the accident that could cause World War III. One small thing that sets off an amazing series of events, like piece of ice-nine just falling out of the thermos. And Dr. Hoenikker, like the scientists of the world, was playing game and caused it all. Here is a description of the world after the ice-nine has wreaked its havoc:There were no smells. There was no movement. Every step I took made a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost. And every squeak was echoed loudly. The season of locking was over. The Earth was locked up tight (179).This description eerily resembles what many have said the Earth will look like during a nuclear winter (Stone, 62).
In addition to Dr. Hoenikker and his doomsday games, Vonnegut provides an interesting analysis of atomic age society with the Bokonon religion. This religion, completely made up by Vonnegut and used in this novel, is the religion of every single inhabitant of San Lorenzo, the books imaginary banana republic. This is the island where Jonah eventually ends up, and where the ice-nine holocaust originates.