Cat's Cradle
Authors: Kurt Vonnegut
AMERICA’S GREATEST SATIRIST
KURT VONNEGUT IS
…
“UNIQUE … one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.”
—D
ORIS
L
ESSING
The New York Times Book Review
“OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST …. We laugh in self-defense.”
—
The Atlantic Monthly
“AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST.”
—
Harper’s Magazine
“A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION.”
—
Chicago Sun-Times
“A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM.”
—
The New York Times
Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Galapagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Jailbird
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House
For Kenneth Littauer,
a man of gallantry and taste.
Nothing in this book is true.
“Live by
the foma
*
that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”
The Books of Bokonon
. I: 5
*
Harmless untruths
4
A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS
9
VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES
11
PROTEIN
14
WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES
18
THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH
20
ICE-NINE
25
THE MAIN THING ABOUT DR. HOENIKKER
34
VIN-DIT
36
MEOW
38
BARRACUDA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
46
THE BOKONONIST METHOD FOR HANDLING CAESAR
49
A FISH PITCHED UP BY AN ANGRY SEA
52
NO PAIN
54
COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS
56
A SELF-SUPPORTING SQUIRREL CAGE
65
A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO
66
THE STRONGEST THING THERE IS
71
THE HAPPINESS OF BEING AN AMERICAN
75
GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCWEITZER
76
JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS
79
WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE
81
A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER
83
DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT
84
BLACKOUT
88
WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT
89
DUFFLE
91
MONA
92
ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST
BOKO-MARU
96
BELL, BOOK, AND CHICKEN IN A HATBOX
100
DOWN THE OUBLIETTE GOES FRANK
101
LIKE MY PREDECESSORS, I OUTLAW BOKONON
103
A MEDICAL OPINION ON THE EFFECTS OF A WRITERS’ STRIKE
105
PAIN-KILLER
106
WHAT BOKONONISTS SAY WHEN THEY COMMIT SUICIDE
111
TIME OUT
113
HISTORY
114
WHEN I FELT THE BULLET ENTER MY HEART
117
SANCTUARY
118
THE IRON MAIDEN AND THE OUBLIETTE
127
THE END
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED
C
ALL ME
J
ONAH
. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.
Jonah—John—if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still—not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.
Listen:
When I was a younger man—two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago …
When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called
The Day the World Ended
.
The book was to be factual.
The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.
It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.
I am a Bokononist now.
I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.
We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a
karass
by Bokonon, and the instrument, the
kan-kan
, that brought me into my own particular
karass
was the book I never finished, the book to be called
The Day the World Ended
.
NICE, NICE, VERY NICE
“I
F YOU FIND YOUR LIFE
tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your
karass.”
At another point in
The Books of Bokonon
he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the
karass
.” By that he means that a
karass
ignores national,
institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.
It is as free-form as an amoeba.
In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:
Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen—
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice—
So many different people
In the same device.
FOLLY
N
OWHERE DOES
B
OKONON
warn against a person’s trying to discover the limits of his
karass
and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.
In the autobiographical section of
The Books of Bokonon
he writes a parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:
I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.
And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, “I’m sorry, but I never could read one of those things.”
“Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God,” I said, “and, when God finds a minute, I’m sure he’ll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even
you
can understand.”
She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed
that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.
She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].
A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS
B
E THAT AS IT MAY
, I intend in this book to include as many members of my
karass
as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.
I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in
The Books of Bokonon
is this:
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion
can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.