Cat's Cradle
by Kurt Vonnegut
Summary
A writer researching a book about the day the atomic bomb fell on Hiroshima instead finds himself drawn into the lives of the three grown children of Felix Hoenikker, a fictional co creator of the bomb who, before his death, also invented ice nine, a crystal that instantly freezes any water it touches into a new, permanently solid form. The narrator's research trail leads him to the fictional Caribbean island of San Lorenzo, an impoverished dictatorship whose people practice Bokononism, a religion its own founder openly admits is built entirely on comforting lies, or foma, and whose vocabulary, karass for a group bound by unseen cosmic purpose, granfalloon for a group that only pretends to be one, gives Vonnegut a vocabulary for mocking every kind of belonging. On the day the narrator is to be installed as San Lorenzo's president, a plane crash sends the frozen body of the island's dying dictator, who has killed himself with a sliver of ice nine, tumbling into the sea, and the crystal instantly converts the entire ocean, freezing the world's water supply and killing nearly everyone on Earth within the novel's closing pages, the handful of survivors ending their own lives on Bokonon's advice rather than face what remains.
Vonnegut writes in very short chapters, flat and joke driven even as the material turns apocalyptic, and the effect is genuinely funny and genuinely bleak within the same paragraph, often the same sentence. It reads fast, almost aphoristic in its rhythm, and the black comedy never lets a reader settle into either pure satire or pure despair, which is exactly what makes the ending land as hard as it does despite how much of the book has been a joke.
Holt, Rinehart and Winston published Cat's Cradle in 1963, Vonnegut's fourth novel and the one that first won him serious literary attention rather than a strictly science fiction readership.
Historical Context & Significance
Cat's Cradle was a finalist for the 1964 Hugo Award for Best Novel, one of five nominees that year; the award went to Clifford Simak's Way Station, with Robert A. Heinlein's Glory Road and Andre Norton's Witch World also on the ballot. The loss did nothing to slow the novel's reputation. The critic Theodore Sturgeon called it appalling, hilarious, shocking and infuriating, an annoying book no reader should skip, a review that captured how differently the book struck readers depending on whether they came to it expecting science fiction or literary satire.
Vonnegut had struggled for most of the 1950s to be read as anything other than a genre writer, and Cat's Cradle became the book that widened his audience past that label even without a major prize behind it. Its invented religion of Bokononism and its vocabulary of karass and granfalloon entered wider use among readers well beyond the novel itself, and the university that had rejected Vonnegut's original master's thesis in anthropology later accepted the novel in its place, awarding him the degree in 1971, eight years after the book that made the case had already found its readers.