Dusting off the Classics

"Cat's Cradle" was the first Kurt Vonnegut book I ever read and after a few pages of his black satire I was completely in love. This 1963 book was Vonnegut's first successful novel, eventually earning him a Master's degree in anthology from the University of Chicago.

The story begins with our narrator John (Jonah) beginning an account of what famous people were doing at the time of the time of the Hiroshima bombings during the end of world war two. John encounters the children of fictional atomic-bomb developer Felix Hoenikker and discovers Hoenikker's last invention, ice-nine. Ice-nine, which was invented to help get rid of mud that slowed down American troops, remains solid at room temperature and solidifies any water molecules that it comes into contact with.

John's interactions with the Hoenikker children lead him to the fictional island of San Lorenzo, a Caribbean island with an extremely poor population, bizarre methods of punishment, a strange, contradictory religion known as Bokonism and a creole version of the English language. San Lorenzo is governed by eccentric dictator Papa Monzano who punishes the smallest crime by impaling the offender on a giant hook. Hoenikker's son Franklin, a major general and personal bodyguard Monzano, is named President of San Lorenzo when Monzano commits suicide to escape from his deadly cancer using ice-nine. Franklin passes the responsibility on to John who grudgingly accepts. When a plane crashes into Monzano's palace, his body slides into the ocean, which causes all water in the world to become frozen, beginning a global catastrophe that kills most people on the earth. John survives the cataclysmic event and eventually comes into contact with the creator of San Lorenzo's strange religion, Bokonan, who gives him the final pages of his Books of Bokonan that sum up Vonnegut's entire message in "Cat's Cradle":

If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity... I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.

What makes Vonnegut such a compelling author is his ability to place strange characters in a reality that strongly resembles our own and yet is slightly off, which allows him to satirize the events going on in our world. Vonnegut witnessed first hand the horrors of life through his mother's suicide and the fire bombing of Dresden during World War II and his writing reflects a wry humor at how screwed up the world was. Obviously "Cat's Cradle" is a story about the danger of atomic bombs, but it's so much deeper than that. Vonnegut explores the destructive nature of mankind and how undeniably rotten the world is. In his ironic and depressing universe, God made the world, it's his fault there's so much pain and death and there's really nothing you can do about it, so you might as well be defiant to the end. In the context of this greater message, "Cat's Cradle" is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago.

Rating: 5 out of 5 stars