Cat's Cradle: Difference between revisions
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{{work}}
{{Infobox book
{{quote| There are lots of good anecdotes about the bomb and Father ... For instance, do you know the story about Father on the day they first tested a bomb out at Alamagordo? After the things went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, "Science has now known sin." And do you know what Father said? He said, "What is sin?"}}▼
| title = Cat's Cradle
| image = Cat's Cradle (1st ed. cover) - Vonnegut.jpg
| caption = First edition hardback cover
| author = Kurt Vonnegut
| central theme =
| elevator pitch = The Caribbean sun, religion, and a scientific doomsday threat.
| genre =
| publication date = 1963
| source page exists =
| wiki URL =
| wiki name =
}}
▲{{quote|
{{quote|
"And?"
''"No damn cat, and no damn cradle."'' }}
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And then everything goes completely to hell.
{{tropelist}}
* [[Aliens in Cardiff]]: Ice-nine is invented in Illium, NY.
** There's no such place, but [[The Iliad|"Ilium" was another name for "Troy"]], and there is a Troy, NY.
* [[All Crimes Are Equal]]: The island of San Lorenzo has only one punishment for any crime: death by impalement on a giant hook.
* [[Arc Words]]: Bokononism has a lot of them. [[That Other Wiki]] has a [[wikipedia:
** "See the cat? See the cradle?"
* [[Artistic License: Biology]]: After
* [[Artistic License Chemistry]]: Ice-nine. Formed of ordinary oxygen and hydrogen, it is able to freeze all liquid water that it touches, into identical crystals of ice-nine via chain-reaction—eventually freezing all water on Earth. This is impossible due to the simple state of hydrogen-bonds that form liquid
** There are
*** But that was the point, water doesn't work that way on
**** Assume ice-nine has a lower energy state than water or other ices, and catalyzes crystallization like ice condensation nuclei. It works. After reading this book, scientists became [https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-rise-and-fall-of-polywater legit worried about "polywater"] for a couple years.
** Scientists have actually found new ways for water molecules to arrange themselves in crystals and have named these forms with the same convention (
* [[Author Tract]]: Readers of this book will not have a hard time figuring out how Vonnegut feels about the atomic bomb, or about scientific research without giving any consideration to the possible consequences.
* [[Banana Republic]]: Because there is nothing of value in San Lorenzo, there's no way to provide a good life for the people there. It's been run by alternating imperialists and tinpot dictators its entire history. McCabe sets up the latest version, but with Bokonon's help, as he cautions everyone not to try to become dictator.
* [[Be Careful What You Wish For]]: The narrator wishes he could have Mona all to himself, and not have her be intimate with any other man. He gets what he asks for {{spoiler|when basically everyone else dies}}.
* [[Becoming the Mask]]: This happens to President Earl McCabe. [[Lampshaded]] by Bokonon in "Between Time and Timbuktu" when Bokonon repeats the line, "We are who we pretend to be, so we must be very careful who we pretend to be."
* [[Believing Their Own Lies]]: Bokonon and Earl McCabe, rulers of the fictional West Indian country San Lorenzo, create a new religion, Bokononism, in order to ease the suffering of the people. To increase the new religion's appeal to the masses by giving them some entertaining drama, McCabe outlaws its practice upon pain of death (while practicing it in secret), whereupon Bokonon "flees" into the jungle, a "wanted" man. Over time, however, the two men become so habituated to their respective roles in the charade that they go insane and become enemies for real.
* [[Cloudcuckoolander]]: Dr. Felix Hoenikker
* [[Chekhov's Gun]]: Played with when it comes to
* [[Con Lang]]: Most of the Bokononist words and island dialect.
* [[Crapsack World]]: Starts bad, [[
* [[Darkskinned Blonde]]: Mona.
* [[Deadpan Snarker]]: The Castles and Newt Hoenniker.
* [[Depopulation Bomb]]: Yeah, ice-nine again. [[It Was His Sled]].
* [[Dissonant Serenity]]: Mona.
* [[Even the Girls Want Her|Even The Gays Want Her]]: Philip Castle's obsessed with Mona, writing and painting all about her. But according to Claire Minton, professional indexer, the way he wrote the index in his history of the island indicates he is a homosexual.
* [[Fetish Fuel]]: A foot fetishist would probably really dig the Bokonist practice of
* [[Foregone Conclusion]]: John converts to Bokononism, {{spoiler|the Mintons die together}}, and mentioned later on, {{spoiler|nearly everyone else too.}}
* [[Foreshadowing]]: Bokonon tells the protagonist what he would do if he were "a younger man"... such as the protagonist. It is heavily implied that John does exactly what Bokonon says. We know
* [[Genius Ditz]]: Dr. Felix Hoenikker. A scientific genius, he worked on the atom bomb and created ice-nine, but for life outside science his wife looked after him the same as their children.
* [[Humans Are the Real Monsters]]: All of the nations wanted to their hands on ice-nine, even though they had atom bombs already.
* [[In Mysterious Ways]]: The Bokononist religion says that all living beings are arranged by God in groups called a ''karass'', arranged around a person or object called a ''wampeter'' (in this case, ice-nine), in order to advance the divine will. The members of a ''karass'' may never even know each other, and their work may overlap in bizarre, coincidental ways, but they work together for a single purpose that they'll never know.
** Bokonon also teaches that one should never decline travel suggestions from strangers, these are said to be God's dance directions.
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* [[Just Before the End]]: Having loaded [[Chekhov's Gun]] with the ice-nine, it was inevitably going to go off in everyone's face.
* [[Lensman Arms Race]]: The Americans, Soviet Union, and San Lorenzo all want to be the first to have ice-nine in their arsenal.
** And by all accounts, they all
* [[Loads and Loads of Characters]]: And most of them in the narrator's ''karass''. Don't worry, he'll tell you right away if they are.
* [[Magnum Opus]]: This or ''[[Slaughterhouse-Five]]''. Also applies in-universe to the narrator, who wrote the book
* [[Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds]]: Dr. Hoenikker is not a [[Complete Monster]]. Rather, he is completely oblivious to the fact that his puttering around in the lab inventing whatever pops into his head might have undesirable consequences, and if somebody were to point this out to him he seems to lack the ability to understand the seriousness of it or to care.
* [[Minovsky Physics]]: ''Ice-nine''. But let's break it down a bit:
** Ice-nine is theoretically possible, but it's implausible for a lower-energy, stable phase of water to be discovered on a planet with as much water as this one.
* [[My God, What Have I Done?]]: The quote at the top of the page provides an example of at least ''one'' scientist feeling this way.▼
** This is fairly obviously inspired by Kurt's brother, Bernard Vonnegut, who discovered the use of silver iodide for [[wikipedia:cloud seeding|cloud seeding]]. Ice nucleation means ice clouds really do grow from tiny seeds -- in the atmosphere. The presence of the seed catalyzes the deposition of ice outside of when it would occur from temperature alone, but still well below the freezing point. ([[This Troper]] is a meteorologist.)
** Bernard's research collaborator, the Nobel Prize-winning chemist Irving Langmuir, was the inspiration for Dr. Hoenikker -- he discovered that dry ice could be used for cloud seeding.
▲* [[My God, What Have I Done?]]: The quote at the top of the page provides an example of at least ''one'' scientist
* [[Posthumous Character]]: Felix Hoenniker and to a lesser extent Earl McCabe.
* [[Prophecies Are Always Right]]: The golden boat will sail again when the end of the world is near.
* [[Self Proclaimed Liar]]: The first thing written in the books of Bokonon is that it's all made up. This doesn't stop it being a workable religion.▼
* [[Ripped from the Headlines]]: This was published the year after the [[Cuban Missile Crisis]].
▲* [[Self
* [[Stealth Pun]]: Boko-maru, the only real ritual of the Bokononists, is described as a meeting of '''souls'''. It is performed by having the two participants remove their footwear, and then [[Fetish Fuel|press the]] '''[[Fetish Fuel|soles]]''' [[Fetish Fuel|of their feet together]].▼
* [[Self-Fulfilling Prophecy]]: Bokonon's prophecy that Mona would marry the next dictator of San Lorenzo means that she's willing to marry whoever becomes the dictator, because she loves everybody. {{spoiler|This is why the narrator agrees to become dictator.}}
* [[Shout-Out]]: The book begins with "Call me Jonah," but then proceeds to tell you the [[Narrator]]'s real name is John, but he feels like a Jonah. Begins just like that whale of a tale, ''[[Moby Dick]]'', via a [[Bible]] reference.
* [[Together in Death]]: {{spoiler|Horlick and Claire Minton}} die in this way.▼
▲* [[Stealth Pun]]: Boko-maru, the only real ritual of the Bokononists, is described as a meeting of '''souls'''. It is performed by having the two participants remove their footwear, and then [[Fetish Fuel|press the
* [[Streisand Effect]]: Long before the effect was named, McCabe and Bokonon purposely decide to ban Bokonon's work to get the islanders to believe it. It works all too well, even getting the themselves into [[Becoming the Mask]]s.
* [[Taken for Granite]]: What happens when a person touches ice-nine. Yes, ice is a rock. Also, foreshadowed by the discussion of the wax museum.
* [[The End of the World as We Know It]]: The end, of course. {{spoiler|Ice-nine gets in the ocean, which freezes across the world in seconds, then freezes every river and stream. Then it freezes the water in the ground, And it freezes any animal or plant or human touching it. It freezes the raindrops. And then the week of tornadoes starts. Afterwards, all that's left is a hot, dry, icy desert of a planet.}}
* [[Too Dumb to Live]]: The ''entire human race''. From the beginning, we get the sense that humans are stupidly rushing themselves toward destruction and that it's just a question of how and when it happens.
* [[True Companions]]: See [[In Mysterious Ways]].
* [[Unwitting Pawn]]: Newt and Angela both get played like violins in the back-story by people looking to get control of some
* [[Unwitting Instigator of Doom]]: "Papa" Monzano, twice. The first time
* [[Wax Museum Morgue]]: The top of Mt. McCabe {{spoiler|when everyone still alive kills themselves}}. Not a typical example, but hey, still horror. Bonus foreshadowing points for mentioning that McCabe got the idea for The Hook from a medieval torture exhibit at a wax museum.
{{reflist}}
[[Category:Lit Fic]]
[[Category:The Sixties]]
[[Category:
[[Category:Literature]]
[[Category:Literature of the 1960s]]
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