Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle: An Analysis

Just as the narrator believes in karass and the idea that some people are meant to be in his life for better or worse, Vonnegut has his narrator illustrate his search for the truth of the "father of the atom bomb" through his contact with various characters. Here Vonnegut creates a character worth remembering: Miss Pefko. By giving her words like "ech" and "crimson lips flap slackly," and a repetition of the phrase "I dunno," Miss Pefko becomes a piece of social commentary as she acknowledges her own stupidity and leaves the unpleasant residue of her ignorance on the literary palate of the reader. She neither understands science nor feels a need to understand it. She shows the danger of people working for something that they do not understand as she indirectly helps to build the weapon of mass destruction. The different people in the narrator's karass that are introduced in the book are deftly utilized by Vonnegut for various revelations. Though their contact with the narrator often lead to humorous dialogues, each have a darker meaning hidden beneath as demonstrated by the ignorance with which Miss Pefko goes to work each day.

Scattered throughout the book are not only quotes from Bokonon but his short poems. A taste of bokononistic poetry is reflective of the humor in the book that masks the darker undertones. The tone of the poems are very sing-song-y due to the end rhymes, but it parallels the humor and even light tone that Vonnegut uses throughout the book. The conversations and often even the subject matter are humorous, bordering on ridiculous, and yet the book centers on one man's research into the life of the "father of the atom bomb." The idea of Bokononism presented in the book is actually best portrayed through the poems of Bokonon. The poems deal with subject matter that may not be appealing or happy in reality but the presentation of the subject is made so childlike that the harshness of reality is softened. Bokononism, a religion completely made up and based on lies, is based on this very idea of understanding the falsity and yet still embracing it. This in turn reflects the general view of most of the characters the narrator encounters who do not seem to have a firm grasp of reality but a warped version of their own, like the man he meets on the plane who believes that public hangings are the solution to reducing juvenile delinquency. Vonnegut challenges the reader to question their own view of the world and look at their own warped perspectives; he asks whether we are not all trapped under the same guise of believing to understand yet knowing nothing, trapped in a nonexistent cat's cradle.

Vonnegut uses several ellipses here almost continually as he leads up to the catch of being President of San Lorenzo. The ellipses serve to create suspense as he puts more physical space between the reader and the twist at the end of the chapter. They also, however, act as connectors, leading from one thought to the next which, in bokononistic-like fashion, span from the very specific to the universally general. The use of ellipses here leading up to the final twist seem to point to everything previous being only a set up for the story to come. They separate each of the items in this list of "all things conspir[ing] to form one cosmic vin-dit" into distinct thoughts and even summaries of different parts of his life leading up to this one moment. Vonnegut is able to utilize punctuation in this passage to create a certain tone and atmosphere of suspense.