Tildes Book Club discussion - August 2025 - Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
This is the seventeenth of an ongoing series of book discussions here on Tildes. We are discussing Cats Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut. Our next book will be Stories of Your Life and Others at the end of September.
I don't have a particular format in mind for this discussion, but I will post some prompts and questions as comments to get things started. You're not obligated to respond to them or vote on them though. So feel free to make your own top-level comment for whatever you wish to discuss, questions you have of others, or even just to post a review of the book you have written yourself.
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I've been slacking on the book club for a bit, so I promised myself I'd get back into it with Cat's Cradle because I used to be a pretty big Vonnegut fan.
Except it's the beginning of the school year; I've been busy, busy, busy and also busy; and I had to get CGA off the ground, so I'm a bit late on this one. But I did it! I also have only tomorrow to start and finish the book for my IRL book club. Wish me luck!
Unfortunately, my brain is still the special kind of fried that comes with beginning a new school year, so I can't really do any sort of meaningful analytical justice to a book that I think has a lot to say.
So, here's a sort of scattershot of thoughts that I jotted down as I read. Also, if you stick around to the end, you'll get to experience my own personal twist ending!
The book read a bit like a fable in places. In a good way. It felt like its characters were stand-ins for ideas and its events have a didactic quality to them.
But it also felt like complete nonsense. Like nothing meant anything. It was absurd. Nonsense.
It was a very effective way of capturing the essence of Bokononism, which openly acknowledges that it's a lie, but also still genuinely means something. It was an interesting duality to experience in a book. I suppose all fiction implicitly does this to some extent, but Vonnegut didn't just call it out directly, he also created the sort of platonic ideal of it with this story.
I mean, it's right there in the central metaphor and title of the book: the cat's cradle.
...
It leads to some fun exchanges. Another thing I liked was Vonnegut's ability to land pithy commentary.
From Chapter 76
JULIAN CASTLE AND ANGELA went to Newt’s painting. Castle made a pinhole of a curled index finger, squinted at the painting through it.
“What do you think of it?” I asked him.
“It’s black. What is it—hell?”
“It means whatever it means,” said Newt.
“Then it’s hell,” snarled Castle.
“I was told a moment ago that it was a cat’s cradle,” I said.
“Inside information always helps,” said Castle.
“I don’t think it’s very nice,” Angela complained. “I think it’s ugly, but I don’t know anything about modern art. Sometimes I wish Newt would take some lessons, so he could know for sure if he was doing something or not.”
“Self-taught, are you?” Julian Castle asked Newt.
“Isn’t everybody?” Newt inquired.
“Very good answer.” Castle was respectful.
I undertook to explain the deeper significance of the cat’s cradle, since Newt seemed disinclined to go through that song and dance again.
“And Castle nodded sagely. “So this is a picture of the meaninglessness of it all! I couldn’t agree more.”
“Do you really agree?” I asked. “A minute ago you said something about Jesus.”
“Who?” said Castle.
“Jesus Christ?”
“Oh,” said Castle. “Him.” He shrugged. “People have to talk about something just to keep their voice boxes in working order, so they’ll have good voice boxes in case there’s ever anything really meaningful to say.”
I don't highlight passages a lot in my books, but I did in this one.
I think EVERYONE has encountered a drunk person like this. Or, regrettably, been the drunk person like this.
And from later in the same chapter:
These are delightfully understated and quippy.
The KING of understatement. This is a polite skewering. Vonnegut is verbally giving him The Hook here.
In fact, the entire chapter this comes from (43) is sort of a pitch perfect satire of, well, unfortunately a lot of things that are still highly relevant today. And it's short. And sharp. Great word economy, with resonance and insight. It can even be read on its own. You don't need to know anything about the rest of the story to get what it's trying to say.
I think I liked the book because it felt completely submerged in relatable millennial irony. In fact, reading this right now, I can't help but wonder if Vonnegut was one of the major factors in creating the pervasive early-internet irony that took root of much of our generation. I started reading him back in the 2000s when edgy, iconoclastic sci-fi was very de rigueur online and Vonnegut was one of the names you couldn't go anywhere without hearing about.
This is what leads me to my own twist ending.
I read through Cat's Cradle, thoroughly enjoyed it, and went to log it in the spreadsheet in which I keep track of every book I read.
And the cell started to autofill when I started to type the name.
Turns out, I already read this book.
My spreadsheet tells me that I finished it in 2008 and that I loved it.
I am not lying when I say that I have ZERO recollection of reading this book. Granted, it's been almost twenty years, but you'd think something from my memory would have triggered while reading it.
I knew of Bokononism obliquely, but I assumed that was from, you know, being a young millennial on the internet in the 2000s.
The only other thing that pinged for me as I read was ice-nine. It's part of the plot in a visual novel game called 999: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors.
I remembered ice-nine from that game, but not from Cat's Cradle. And according to my video game spreadsheet, I played that game in 2013, only five years after allegedly reading Cat's Cradle for the first time.
Not only did I not remember ice-nine being from CC now, I'm also pretty sure I didn't remember it back then, in 2013.
So, what happened?
Well, for one, I already have a pretty crappy memory. So that plays into it generally.
It's possible (but highly improbable) that I somehow logged the wrong book in my spreadsheet way back when.
But the most likely explanation was that 2008 was the focal point of, uh, a really shitty time in my life where I was in an unbelievably bad mental state. I looked through some of the other books I read that year and I don't remember several of them.
While there is a pessimistic way to look at this (the horror of me returning to previous trauma), I think there's an optimistic way to look at this too, and it's where I'm choosing to land here.
You know how people say they wish they can re-read a book again for the first time? Well I actually did that. By accident (naturally).
Also, you know how they say that time heals all wounds? Well those unbelievably awful years for me now feel like a faint blip in the rear-view mirror. I've put a lot of distance in between them and me, and I'm in a much better place now. In the same way I forgot I read Cat's Cradle, I've also forgotten a lot of their specific darkness and pain.
Revisiting the book unintentionally ended up being its own sort of journey of self-awareness for me, not just from what the book had to say, but the actual act of reading it. Pretty wild.
So, ultimately, how did I feel about this book?
Busy, busy, busy.
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Please forgive me for adding a top level comment.
The version of the audiobook I had included a really casual interview with Vonnegut. For anyone else who got it, what did you think? Did it change your outlook on the book?
You are invited and encouraged to leave top level comments. The questions are suggestions only. Tildes is full of bright people with unique insights.
I listened to it as well. I don't think it necessarily changed my outlook, but it helped me connect to the author as a real person. I found his history, and particularly his experience during the war to be illuminating. It added some real context to his views, and for me also helped explain his later book Slaughterhouse-Five, which deals with the ugly truths of war more directly.
Yeah, the interview was unexpected. I don’t think it added anything to the book, per se, though it was a major change of tone after the ending!
Oh mine was a paper version, what was the most surprising or insightful things from the interview? How soon after the writing of the book is the interview date?
I don't know what the date was. I hadn't read anything about Vonnegut going in and had never read any of his books. I first heard of Slaughterhouse 5 around the time that Saw came out, so apparently my subconscious decided it was a horror book. My partner - who used to work in a bookstore and is very well read - told me going in that Vonnegut was a typical hippie.
In the interview he talked about being taken prisoner in the Battle of the Bulge, and that he went through the bombing of Dresden inside a slaughterhouse. Later he talked about how reviewers didn't like him and that they tried to drive general culture by basically pushing people to read some books and ignore others.
My partner hadn't known about the POW stuff, we talked about it later. It did change my perspective on the book.
We don't really get much background on the author in the book, so I guess I had filled in the blanks with "hippie". This isn't an insult, there are a lot of self proclaimed "old hippies" where I live and I'm friends with several. I had been assuming the author inside the book was generally anti war, period. Having an opinion because of what you have learned and read is different than having an opinion based on experience. So my imagined background for that guy shifted pretty hard, assuming he was at least partly biographical.
This was the copy I had.
It's been ages since I read this and while the details of the story are fuzzy, I think this is still the perfect venue to ask whether people have read his short story Harrison Bergeron. It was mandatory reading in my grade 11 science fiction unit and it still sticks with me.
Yup same mandatory reading. I think it was supremely unfair to spring on kids without context of his view on war, understanding that the man suffers from PTSD, and any context of the tone of his other writings.
I remember coming out of that reading thinking the author means to say DEIs and govt efforts towards equity are stupid. Did a lot of current day North Americans come away with the same mistaken notion?
I read it in seventh grade, in the US, and took away a more nuanced interpretation. It seemed like a call to look at equality as a project of providing crutches, rather than equitably fracturing femurs. Maybe even a koan on pacifism, where in a world of totalitarian "equality", where all conflicts are "just", or at least as evenly matched as possible, there might still be someone who thinks they're too good for peace.
At that time, American literature was very preoccupied with political transgression for its own sake, and I really despise the way that our poor systems of education set people up to be entirely ignorant of context when discussing it. It's no fault of readers, let alone kids, to not keep all of the following in mind: Ayn Rand's popularity at the time, the extremely shallow pop culture understandings of 1984, the Red Scare, the second World War and the projects undertaken during it, the lingering popularity of eugenics, censorship in film, expansion of all forms of regulation, the very beginnings of the civil rights movement, the misuses of psychiatry by the powerful around the world. It's a huge fault of our collective understanding that the "warning against overcorrection while mocking the slippery slope model of accessibility" reading isn't more obvious. When we're raised in unjust environments, of course a story making just arguments with ironic logic will sound like more injustice.
Edit to fix an accidentally'd sentence.
I'm not sure what other reading is possible, although I don't think Vonnegut himself thought that. The story was probably just him having his usual black-humored fun depicting the worst possible outcome for any attempt to improve things.
:| as a buncha edgy teens who thought we were so smart, we naturally empathized with the mutilation of Harrison, and bemoaned the injustice etc.
Knowing his humour more, the joke was on us. Harrison Bergeron is a story that is critical of what edge lords think is meant by DEI, that it aims to hurt the naturally gifted, hide the beautiful, and to hold down the best in order for us all to sink to the lowest common denominator through violence. It's a parody of that kind of thinking, along the lines of A Modest Proposal of why shouldn't the virtuous rich eat the young of the unwashed poor.
It's hard to say. The unit didn't unpack those themes specifically as we only spent a single class with it.
DEI wasn't really a thing in Canada in the 90s so the premise and the work was discussed based on its style, flow and setting merits instead.
Also, it was Jr. High now that I remember, so deeper exploration probably wasn't possible.
Did Cat's Cradle match your expectations or did it surprise you?
I had no inkling of what the book or author was like, so it surprised me in a good way. I enjoyed the story and aloofness of the characters.
Were there incidents or phrases that you found funny? What were they?
I was quite chuffed by Frank's mannerisms towards the end of the book. "I like the cut of your jib! I want to speak cold turkey to you -- there's no sense in beating around the bush."
Like his father, Frank never really learned how to communicate with people. It made him feel very inhuman as a character, as if he's only parroting speech. A simulacrum of a person. He had his interests, and didn't much care about anything else.
It's certainly an amusing way of making the point, and I had a giggle at the idea of somebody only speaking in clichés.
The gigantic pillar monument turns out to be mother :)
This was one of my favorite parts!
What did you think about Bokonon, Bokononism, or how Vonnegut portrayed Christianity?
One of my increasingly favorite parts of the Hebrew Bible is the trio of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, which are part of the Wisdom Literature. Proverbs presents how things ought to work (almost in a way that people who identify with karma would recognize), Ecclesiastes reflects that we’re all going to die and everything essentially leads to the same (frustrating?) end, and Job recognizes that the most critical parts of life are entirely out of our hands. Bokononism frequently felt like wisdom literature from the Hebrew Bible, and I often felt it captured absurdist truth (but still Truth) despite stating that it was all a lie.
I listened to the audiobook. Until they actually explained it, I thought it had something to do with Francis Bacon because of the way the reader pronounced it.
The religion itself reminded me of the guru in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, some person that people started listening to and quoting because they decided he was wise.
His relationship with the old dictator was interesting. People do seem to be happiest when there's a rivalry.
What do you think about how the book ends? Ice 9?
I really liked that ice-nine had a plausible explanation as a polymorph of water. The facts of seed crystals forming in water, disappearing polymorphs, and different phases of ice were all things I had some vague ideas about, but never enough knowledge of to fully understand. So I found the concept and explanation about stacking bowling balls to actually be fairly convincing, scientifically-speaking.
Apparently in the original publication of the book, it included a disclaimer that "Nothing in this book is true", to help set aside concerns of this being a real threat. There's quite an interesting parallel there to what Bokonon later says in his own writings, that "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies". It's all just foma - harmless untruths. But just because it's fiction, doesn't mean it doesn't hold any value, right?
Regarding the ending, it reminded me a lot of Dr. Strangelove, which came out the following year (1964).
Movie spoiler
So much of the film is spent trying to avoid a bad outcome. Yet when the catastrophe does come to pass, people essentially shrug their shoulders and move on. They immediately go back to arguing over petty things, like establishing "cave dominance". Even at the end of the world, people are gonna people.In Cat's Cradle, the new normal is one where water is often deadly and germs no longer exist. Where animal life is nearly-extinct, and technologically has been sent back centuries. And yet when you read along, it almost feels like not much has actually changed. The characters shrug and resign themselves to their new reality. So it goes.
Is there a comment here about apathy? About how inaction can lead to the worst outcomes? Ice-nine seems like a not-so-subtle analogy for the atomic bomb, or perhaps the immediate follow-up of the hydrogen bomb. It feels like Vonnegut wanted to inspire people to take stronger stances against enabling these doomsday scenarios. Don't build a bigger bomb, or any other kind of weapon. Nothing good will come of it.
The dual doomsday pairing of atomic bomb with Ice 9 reminds me of this 1920 poem by Robert Frost
Fire and Ice
I must applaud your crossover reference to Slaughterhouse Five.
I agree, this is a book about the prevailing human spirit. Despite being faced with abject tragedy, they still form their granfalloons, they still keep persevering with their stupid humanistic tropes, memes, and traditions, in spite of the rest of humanity destroying itself. Even if ultimately successful in destroying the world, if any humans survive, humanity will as well.
I feel like a slightly more cynical take on this same sort of riff is Restaurant at the end of the Universe, where Douglas Adams posits that humanity left to its own devices on an empty world would keep being publicists, accountants, marketing publicists, and telephone sanitizers.
I think the most hopeful and non-cynical thing about the ending is that ants survived, and water inside of cells didn't destroy muscles / bodies. If Ants made it, certainly all kinds of microbes did as well, even the ones frozen in Ice 9.
Asize from that, Mom and her husband not only survived but became actually helpful and decent people, in the absence of anything else worth capitalising over.
If enough humans somehow survived, all kinds of animal DNA are perfectly preserved inside Ice 9 and could possibly be revived or cloned.
The concept of ice 9 is great, and kudos to Vonnegut for staying away from the messy details of how it was first made. At the end though, I had two points to raise.
So, from a purely scientific perspective, I didn't think the weather would be hot and I didn't think there would be clouds. Most of the heat that we experience from the air around us is from water vapor that has been heated by absorbing solar radiation. In an "Ice 9" world, the vapor would turn into ice 9 essentially on contact. As a result, the air would turn dry, but there would be no heat, as our primary greenhouse gas would have virtually disappeared instantaneously. Things would get cool and dry in a hurry.
Perhaps things heated up due to the massive latent heat of crystallization being released from the "freezing" of the ocean, but no mention is made of this, and delving into this would also reveal the impossibility of rapidly freezing the ocean anyway. That said, it would be interesting to know what the colligative properties of saltwater would be in contact with ice 9.
Second, because there would be no vapor, there would be no clouds, and there would be no tornados, at least not the "wormy" kind mentioned at the end.
Regardless, it wouldn't be any fun.
The ending really made me want to write either a book or a collection of short stories about groups of people elsewhere who survived when the oceans froze.
The hedonistic nihilism of San Lorenzo (live a life of leisure and comfort until you die, no possibility of continuing civilisation) seemed a natural ending for the book.
Imagine being somewhere else and knowing nothing about Ice 9, but surviving by luck. Making similar, or other discoveries about how to live life after. In particular I have in mind a group that needs to cross a body of water and finding interesting solutions to doing so.
I don't think the goal would be to make it feel like Vonnegut, but if I were going to attempt it, I'd want to read enough of his books and study his influences to be able to bring some themes from his work, or commentary on themes from his work, to the stories.
If you write a fanfic, I want to read it. : )
Definitely!
Same, subscribing to your fanfic.
Incidentally, have you read Margaret Atwood's. Oryx and Crake? It's a speculative fiction in which human civilization was ended by mad scientist Crake via sexually transmitted disease. The book begins after The Event, with Jimmy, Crake's best / only friend, trying to make sense of how to go on as the only (asterisk) human left on the planet. Check it out if this one whet your appetite for "after the flood, now what".
Thanks! I think I have to read more of Vonnegut's œuvre and maybe some analysis before I'll feel prepared to bring the idea to fruition, but we'll see what happens.
I did try Oryx and Crake years ago, but I could not get into it. What I recall was just that it was very weird. I'll have to give it another shot. Thanks for the rec.
Were there moments of irony or satire that stood out to you?
Hah. That even though Felix Hoenikker was a garbage tier father, the irony is that his legacy enabled all three of his children to fulfill their dreams.
Each child got a piece of Ice 9: the new ultimate weapon after their father's atomic bomb. Angela traded it for the illusion of a happy home with a handsome engineer husband, the kind of man almost exactly like her father, and the kind of life almost exactly like her mother. Frank wanted to build model towns and he traded his piece for a whole dang scale model kingdom. Newton traded his Ice 9 to the Russians for a fantasy honeymoon with a lady who only danced for him.
This is reading way too much into the text, but if Felix was less of an air head, he would have figured out that even after dropping two atomic bombs, America still wants the next superweapon, that war continues, and the end of the world is coming. Maybe, an aware Felix would know, that there's no future for his kids, so spend what time is left and let them play in a temporary fantasy world: see the cat? See the cradle?
Irony 2: even thought the Hoenikker kids lamented their mother's poor marriage, Angela married someone who also doesn't respect her; Frank disrespected the model shop owner's marriage, and Newt didn't end up picking a good partner either.
Favourite satire moment: the narrator went from being critical of dictatorship to speed running into becoming one.
Private head canon: the narrator suggested Emily Hoenikker had all three children together with Asa Breed, and maybe it's true, and Felix knew and didn't care. Felix wanted to focus on science and needed people to care for him, that's why he agreed to become married, and the State defense Dept or something hired Emily to be his live in help. That's why Felix tipped Emily when she made him a big Noble Prize breakfast . That's why he sent a pregnant Emily to pickup an abandoned car, she was an employee / co-worker. That's why he pulled Angela out of school to be caretaker 2.0: science comes first, and society is there to provide.
This stood out to me from early in the book when Dr Breed bring up George Minor Moakley:
The horror he seems to feel at the idea of killing so many, while being dismissive of the results of using something like the atomic bomb as being beyond the responsibility of those that developed stands out to me, and I think generally reflects the books thoughts about that mindset.
What would you like to ask other readers about this book?
I'd like to ask: what do you think we are reading in Cat's Cradle? The narrator is a journalist by trade and is making a record of the end of the world. It begs the question then, who are we as the readers of this narrative?
The book ends abruptly, as he meets Bokonon, who reveals what is last act will be. Are we to believe that the narrator has done the same, and that we are... survivors or aliens that now find this preserved journalist with the narrative of Cat's Cradle as his pillow?
I read it as a sort of tragedy of the inability for human beings to communicate very important ideas.
Felix's science ideas can't be understood because he had few intellectual peers. The "girls" who work at Breed's can't understand their coworkers, and neither do they understand why chocolates at Christmas is such a big deal. The elevator man is unintelligible. The death row prisoner's Magnum Opus was
deadread by kids for the sex scene. It took Newt almost a whole lifetime to figure out what Felix was trying to say by playing cats cradle with him. Etc.The preface says it's all fiction, including this preface.
The entire book is a game of cat's cradle an older man who's seen devastation and a possible end to our species is trying desperately to show us, the readers. Where's the cat and where's the cradle?
Was this your first Vonnegut book? How did you react to his writing style?
This was my first Vonnegut book.
It was the biggest load of nonsense I've ever read.
It was also one of the most fun and thought-provoking things I've read.
Every time a new character was introduced, I'd feel like it was just more randomness/quirkiness for the sake of being odd, but after putting the book down I wouldnt be able to stop thinking about it. I'm not sure if I'm dumber or wiser for having read it, but I'm glad I did.
"Thought-provoking nonsense that you can't stop thinking about afterwards which makes you unsure of if you're dumber or wiser for having read it" is basically Vonnegut in a nutshell... so I think you absolutely nailed it after your first exposure to him and his writing! :P
I'm so glad you got something out of the experience of reading it!
Not even close. ;) Vonnegut is one of my all-time favorite authors so I've read pretty much everything he's ever written, many of them multiple times. To put it in perspective, when we moved 6 months ago I got rid of the vast majority of my physical books, but my three absolute favorites of his, Slaughterhouse Five, Timequake, and Welcome to the Monkey House (one of his short story collections) were amongst the very very few books I actually kept. I adore Cat's Cradle too, but I only had an old, dogeared copy of it so I did get rid of that, and just bought an ebook copy to reread for the book club (and for whenever I inevitably reread it again in the future ;).
This was my first, very glad it made the list.
It's funny. I listened to the audio book, but the feel of the book put me back reading golden age science fiction in the 90s, like I could almost picture the paperback with yellowing pages. I've not been able to quite pin it down, but I think something about the tone of the dialog and the pacing of the story.
The absurdity of it reminded me a little of Douglas Adams, but without the British snark.
I've read Harrison Bergeron (15 years ago), but that's been my only other experience with his work. The amount of levity and irreverence in the writing style of Cat's Cradle irrationally pissed me off and I haven't really narrowed down why. Maybe the style and tone struck me as mismatched to the subject matter? (Because I mean, it by and large was mismatched.) The entire time I was reading the book, I felt like I was inescapably losing time to nonsense. For comparison, I've read Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but that didn't provoke the same feelings.
My feelings while reading Cat's Cradle basically precluded my absorption of anything I might have picked up as meaningful beyond a surface reading, so I don't have a lot else to say about it as far as discussion goes.
I also didn't love this book. I'm not sure why but it didn't speak to me.
I did love slaughterhouse five.
This was my first - somehow I didn't have any of his books as required reading in school, even though both of my siblings did. I enjoyed the book and style, but it did take me a bit to get into it.
What do you want to say about how Vonnegut showed science and scientists?
It reminds me a lot of what's going on with AI right now, except that we have the ability to look back at the bomb and see what happened.
Folks may still say that what they're working on in particular isn't dangerous, or it won't be as long as it doesn't get into "the wrong hands". I don't think anyone has that as a valid excuse anymore.
One thing that's different is the sudden wiping out of so many jobs for folks that might be able to survive if they shift over into AI.
I got the impression the author himself sees scientists as feckless children.
What do you want to say about how Vonnegut portrayed San Lorenzo and its people?
What do you want to say about how Vonnegut portrayed the US and American characters at home and abroad?