Cat's Cradle

Bokononism is a religion native to San Lorenzo, founded by Bokonon. Bokonon’s influence over John grows during the course of the novel, as John comes into contact with Bokonon’s teachings and finds them attractive. In contrast with some real-world religions that cite divine manifestations as their origin, Bokononism does not claim to be true. Instead, it is designed expressly to bring comfort and happiness to the people of San Lorenzo, and it does this quite well.

Bokonon’s teachings typically have an uplifting effect, even if they are low on practical value. For instance, Bokonon’s concept of a karass, or a team of people doing God’s will unintentionally demands little of listeners while allowing them to speculate passively as to God’s purposes. Enriched by unique language, rites, and cosmological teachings, Bokononism also serves as a point of comparison to real-world religions, particularly Christianity. While John, and by extension, Vonnegut, may reject some of the claims those religions make, he acknowledges the value and richness they can add to human experience. Through this acknowledgment, Vonnegut raises the question of whether religious truths must be objectively true to be valuable and likewise the question of whether religious truths must be objectively true to be dangerous.

A cat’s cradle is a string figure formed by looping string between the hands in a particular pattern, but it is a highly complex symbol in Vonnegut’s work. Within the novel, it first appears in Newt’s recollection of the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On that day, for perhaps the first and only time, Dr. Hoenikker attempted to play with Newt, then six years old. Later, as an adult, Newt paints a cat’s cradle and explains its significance to John, suggesting that the string figure is poorly named because it contains neither cat nor cradle. Newt adopts the cat’s cradle as a symbol of the disjunction of modern life, of the gaps between perception, language, reality, and more.

As a whole, the cat’s cradle represents the assertion that there is little, if any, truth to be found in any of humankind’s ideas because they are all based on necessarily subjective assessments and a universally shared but unspoken agreement to gloss over this fact. While a cat’s cradle can be easily identified as the stringed construction in a children’s game, the inherent falseness of its name is generally ignored, and this symbolizes Vonnegut’s idea that there are no real truths and by extension no real answers to existence. This is fundamentally nihilistic, and John explicitly rejects the nihilism of the poet who lives in his apartment while he’s gone because John doesn’t want to be a part of the chaos, destruction, and tragedy that results from his nihilistic lifestyle.

Though John embraces the philosophical and spiritual comforts of Bokononism, however, he still experiences the same chaos, destruction, and tragedy, and ultimately chooses to die while attempting what he understands is a futile act while still embracing the idea that it actually has the meaning he wishes it does. John went a long way to accomplish nothing, illustrating how life can be a complicated, tangled thing, just like a cat’s cradle, but ultimately, there are no clear answers. Just as Newt takes the cat’s cradle as an important symbol for life from a relatively meaningless memory of his father, the readers are all left to find meaning for themselves. 

Ice-nine is a form of ice, discovered by Dr. Hoenikker, that has a much higher melting point than regular ice. Within the novel, it represents the peak of human scientific achievement, the accomplishment of which seems like magic. Throughout the novel, John draws readers’ attention to ice-nine’s status and location, as when he bitterly points out that Angela failed to mention “that she and Frank and little Newt had divided up the old man’s ice-nine” (115). By the end of the novel, ice-nine has transitioned from a hypothetical idea to a bargaining chip to a weapon and finally to a devastating unnatural disaster, reflecting the horrors that can result from a misapplication of scientific discoveries. It also represents how a small thing of seemingly no consequence can have huge impacts on a larger scale.