preview

Human Stupidity In Cat's Cradle

Decent Essays
Open Document

Anyone who is lucky enough to have the opportunity to read the novel Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut will experience a great read. It was an astonishing novel, which is enjoyable from beginning to end and you feel like you are part of the plot. Cat’s Cradle starts out as a man’s journey to write a story over the atomic bomb, but a thing called ice-nine quickly changes the scenario. Kurt Vonnegut uses imagery, irony, and a summative phrase throughout the work to entice his reader to turn the page.
Throughout most of the story, the reader becomes familiar with a religion known as Bokononism. It was founded by a man named Bokonon and is the religion most people on the island of San Lorenzo practice. A few months after the catastrophe in which ice-nine freezes the oceans, the narrator finds Bokonon on the side of a street. He asks the old man what he is doing, in which Bokonon replies: “I am thinking, young man, about the final sentence for The Books of Bokonon. The time for the final …show more content…

191). He then hands the narrator a piece of paper. The paper says: “If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.” (Vonnegut, 1963, p. 191). This one sentence pretty much sums up the story. The young man section of the quote represents Jonah, the narrator. The history of human stupidity would be the book Jonah has written since the ice-nine outbreak.The book depicts what he witnessed ever since he started his book about Felix Hoenikker and the

Get Access