Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut: A Summary of the Plot, Characters and Ideas
What Cat's Cradle is about
Cat's Cradle is Kurt Vonnegut's fourth novel, published on 18 March 1963. It is a satirical, postmodern book with science fiction elements, aimed at science, technology, the purpose of religion and the arms race. The humour is morbid throughout. The novel was nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1964.
The narrator introduces himself with a line that borrows from Moby-Dick: "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John." Neither name is used again. He is a professional writer, and he tells the story as a flashback. Back in the mid-twentieth century he was planning a book called The Day the World Ended, an account of what ordinary people were doing on the day the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
His research takes him to the family of the late Felix Hoenikker, a Nobel laureate physicist and co-creator of the atomic bomb. He writes to Newt, the younger son, asking what his father did on the day of the bombing. The answer is that Felix was playing the string game cat's cradle. A year later the narrator travels to the fictional town of Ilium, New York, to interview Hoenikker's colleagues. There he hears about ice-nine, a substance Hoenikker worked up for military use. Ice-nine is an alternative structure of water. It is solid at room temperature, and it acts as a seed crystal: any ordinary water it touches freezes instantly and becomes more ice-nine.
A magazine assignment then sends the narrator to San Lorenzo, a fictional Caribbean island and one of the poorest countries on Earth. On the flight he runs into two of the Hoenikker children and meets the new American ambassador, who hands him a guidebook to the island's history and its outlawed religion, Bokononism. From there the book becomes a slow walk towards a very large catastrophe, told in short chapters and dry asides.
The main characters
Felix Hoenikker is dead before the novel starts, but he shapes everything in it. He is the pure scientist, curious and childlike, who treats the bomb and ice-nine as puzzles rather than weapons.
His three adult children carry the consequences. Angela is the daughter. Frank becomes personal bodyguard to the island's dictator, a job he secures by handing over a piece of ice-nine. Newt, the youngest, supplies the novel's central image when he points out that a cat's cradle is just string with no cat and no cradle in it, a neat symbol for the meaninglessness of life.
"Papa" Monzano is the dictator of San Lorenzo, dying of cancer and looking for a successor. Mona is his beautiful adopted daughter, and the narrator wants her badly. Bokonon is the founder of the island's religion, a former leader who built it as a utopian project to give people purpose and community in the face of poverty that could not be fixed. The religion is officially banned and Bokonon lives in hiding in the jungle, which was always the point: the ban gives the faith a forbidden glamour. Monzano threatens Bokononists with impalement on a large hook, yet almost everyone on the island practises it in secret, including Monzano himself.
The themes
The book sets two systems side by side and finds both of them wanting. Science produces ice-nine without asking what it is for. Religion produces The Books of Bokonon, which openly admit to being useful lies. Bokononism mixes irreverent, nihilistic and cynical observations about life and God's will with an emphasis on coincidence and serendipity, plus sayings and rituals that are by turns thoughtful and funny. Vonnegut does not pretend it is true. He asks whether truth is the most useful thing a person can be given.
Running underneath is moral responsibility. Hoenikker is not a villain. He is simply absent from the question of what his work will do. That is Vonnegut's real target, and it is why Hiroshima sits at the book's starting point.
How it ends
Stop here if you want the ending kept back. Monzano, bedridden and dying, swallows ice-nine and his body turns instantly to solid ice-nine. Frank admits he supplied it, and the Hoenikker children explain how they collected chunks of the substance into thermos flasks after their father's death. During an air show held for the narrator's inauguration as president, a plane malfunctions and crashes into the seaside palace. Monzano's frozen body falls into the sea. Every sea, river and groundwater supply on Earth turns to ice-nine at once, and violent tornadoes follow. The narrator escapes with Mona into a secret bunker beneath the palace.
Why it still matters
The arms race that produced the novel has changed shape, but the question has not. Cat's Cradle is about people who build things without owning what they build, and about the stories communities tell themselves in order to keep going. It is short, funny and bleak at the same time, and it suits readers who want satire with real teeth rather than comfort. For anyone coming to Vonnegut for the first time, it is one of the clearest statements of what he spent a career arguing.
