Read Cat's Cradle Online

Authors: Kurt Vonnegut

Cat's Cradle

     
AMERICA’S GREATEST SATIRIST
     
KURT VONNEGUT IS

“UNIQUE … one of the writers who map our landscapes for us, who give names to the places we know best.”

—D
ORIS
L
ESSING
The New York Times Book Review

“OUR FINEST BLACK-HUMORIST …. We laugh in self-defense.”


The Atlantic Monthly

“AN UNIMITATIVE AND INIMITABLE SOCIAL SATIRIST.”


Harper’s Magazine

“A CAUSE FOR CELEBRATION.”


Chicago Sun-Times

“A LAUGHING PROPHET OF DOOM.”


The New York Times

BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT

Bluebeard
Breakfast of Champions
Cat’s Cradle
Deadeye Dick
Galapagos
God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater
Jailbird
Mother Night
Palm Sunday
Player Piano
The Sirens of Titan
Slapstick
Slaughterhouse-Five
Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons
Welcome to the Monkey House

For Kenneth Littauer,
a man of gallantry and taste.

Nothing in this book is true.

“Live by
the foma
*
that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy.”

The Books of Bokonon
. I: 5

*
Harmless untruths

     CONTENTS

1
THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

2
NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

3
FOLLY

4
A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

5
LETTER FROM A PRE-MED

6
BUG FIGHTS

7
THE ILLUSTRIOUS HOENIKKERS

8
NEWT’S THING WITH ZINKA

9
VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES

10
SECRET AGENT X-9

11
PROTEIN

12
END OF THE WORLD DELIGHT

13
THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE

14
WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES

15
MERRY CHRISTMAS

16
BACK TO KINDERGARTEN

17
THE GIRL POOL

18
THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH

19
NO MORE MUD

20
ICE-NINE

21
THE MARINES MARCH ON

22
MEMBER OF THE YELLOW PRESS

23
THE LAST BATCH OF BROWNIES

24
WHAT A
WAMPETER
IS

25
THE MAIN THING ABOUT DR. HOENIKKER

26
WHAT GOD IS

27
MEN FROM MARS

28
MAYONNAISE

29
GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

30
ONLY SLEEPING

31
ANOTHER BREED

32
DYNAMITE MONEY

33
AN UNGRATEFUL MAN

34
VIN-DIT

35
HOBBY SHOP

36
MEOW

37
A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL

38
BARRACUDA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

39
FATA MORGANA

40
HOUSE OF HOPE AND MERCY

41
A
KARASS
BUILT FOR TWO

42
BICYCLES FOR AFGHANISTAN

43
THE DEMONSTRATOR

44
COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS

45
WHY AMERICANS ARE HATED

46
THE BOKONONIST METHOD FOR HANDLING CAESAR

47
DYNAMIC TENSION

48
JUST LIKE SAINT AUGUSTINE

49
A FISH PITCHED UP BY AN ANGRY SEA

50
A NICE MIDGET

51
O.K., MOM

52
NO PAIN

53
THE PRESIDENT OF FABRI-TEK

54
COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS

55
NEVER INDEX YOUR OWN BOOK

56
A SELF-SUPPORTING SQUIRREL CAGE

57
THE QUEASY DREAM

58
TYRANNY WITH A DIFFERENCE

59
FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

60
AN UNDERPRIVILEGED NATION

61
WHAT A CORPORAL WAS WORTH

62
WHY HAZEL WASN’T SCARED

63
REVERENT AND FREE

64
PEACE AND PLENTY

65
A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO

66
THE STRONGEST THING THERE IS

67
HY-U-O-OOK-KUH!

68
HOON-YERA MORA-TOORZ

69
A BIG MOSAIC

70
TUTORED BY BOKONON

71
THE HAPPINESS OF BEING AN AMERICAN

72
THE PISSANT HILTON

73
BLACK DEATH

74
CAT’S CRADLE

75
GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCWEITZER

76
JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

77
ASPIRIN AND
BOKO-MARU

78
RING OF STEEL

79
WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE

80
THE WATERFALL STRAINERS

81
A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER

82
ZAH-MAH-KI-BO

83
DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT

84
BLACKOUT

85
A PACK OF
FOMA

86
TWO LITTLE JUGS

87
THE CUT OF MY JIB

88
WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT

89
DUFFLE

90
ONLY ONE CATCH

91
MONA

92
ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST
BOKO-MARU

93
HOW I ALMOST LOST MY MONA

94
THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

95
I SEE THE HOOK

96
BELL, BOOK, AND CHICKEN IN A HATBOX

97
THE STINKING CHRISTIAN

98
LAST RITES

99
DYOT MEET MAT

100
DOWN THE OUBLIETTE GOES FRANK

101
LIKE MY PREDECESSORS, I OUTLAW BOKONON

102
ENEMIES OF FREEDOM

103
A MEDICAL OPINION ON THE EFFECTS OF A WRITERS’ STRIKE

104
SULFATHIAZOLE

105
PAIN-KILLER

106
WHAT BOKONONISTS SAY WHEN THEY COMMIT SUICIDE

107
FEAST YOUR EYES!

108
FRANK TELLS US WHAT TO DO

109
FRANK DEFENDS HIMSELF

110
THE FOURTEENTH BOOK

111
TIME OUT

112
NEWT’S MOTHER’S RETICULE

113
HISTORY

114
WHEN I FELT THE BULLET ENTER MY HEART

115
AS IT HAPPENED

116
THE GRAND AH-WHOOM

117
SANCTUARY

118
THE IRON MAIDEN AND THE OUBLIETTE

119
MONA THANKS ME

120
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

121
I AM SLOW TO ANSWER

122
THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON

123
OF MICE AND MEN

124
FRANK’S ANT FARM

125
THE TASMANIANS

126
SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON

127
THE END

     1
     THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

C
ALL ME
J
ONAH
. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John.

Jonah—John—if I had been a Sam, I would have been a Jonah still—not because I have been unlucky for others, but because somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided. And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place this Jonah was there.

Listen:

When I was a younger man—two wives ago, 250,000 cigarettes ago, 3,000 quarts of booze ago …

When I was a much younger man, I began to collect material for a book to be called
The Day the World Ended
.

The book was to be factual.

The book was to be an account of what important Americans had done on the day when the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan.

It was to be a Christian book. I was a Christian then.

I am a Bokononist now.

I would have been a Bokononist then, if there had been anyone to teach me the bittersweet lies of Bokonon. But Bokononism was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knives that ring this little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo.

We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a
karass
by Bokonon, and the instrument, the
kan-kan
, that brought me into my own particular
karass
was the book I never finished, the book to be called
The Day the World Ended
.

     2
     NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

“I
F YOU FIND YOUR LIFE
tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons,” writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your
karass.”

At another point in
The Books of Bokonon
he tells us, “Man created the checkerboard; God created the
karass
.” By that he means that a
karass
ignores national,
institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

It is as free-form as an amoeba.

In his “Fifty-third Calypso,” Bokonon invites us to sing along with him:

Oh, a sleeping drunkard
Up in Central Park,
And a lion-hunter
In the jungle dark,
And a Chinese dentist,
And a British queen—
All fit together
In the same machine.
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice;
Nice, nice, very nice—
So many different people
In the same device.

     3
     FOLLY

N
OWHERE DOES
B
OKONON
warn against a person’s trying to discover the limits of his
karass
and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do. Bokonon simply observes that such investigations are bound to be incomplete.

In the autobiographical section of
The Books of Bokonon
he writes a parable on the folly of pretending to discover, to understand:

I once knew an Episcopalian lady in Newport, Rhode Island, who asked me to design and build a doghouse for her Great Dane. The lady claimed to understand God and His Ways of Working perfectly. She could not understand why anyone should be puzzled about what had been or about what was going to be.

And yet, when I showed her a blueprint of the doghouse I proposed to build, she said to me, “I’m sorry, but I never could read one of those things.”

“Give it to your husband or your minister to pass on to God,” I said, “and, when God finds a minute, I’m sure he’ll explain this doghouse of mine in a way that even
you
can understand.”

She fired me. I shall never forget her. She believed
that God liked people in sailboats much better than He liked people in motorboats. She could not bear to look at a worm. When she saw a worm, she screamed.

She was a fool, and so am I, and so is anyone who thinks he sees what God is Doing, [writes Bokonon].

     4
     A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

B
E THAT AS IT MAY
, I intend in this book to include as many members of my
karass
as possible, and I mean to examine all strong hints as to what on Earth we, collectively, have been up to.

I do not intend that this book be a tract on behalf of Bokononism. I should like to offer a Bokononist warning about it, however. The first sentence in
The Books of Bokonon
is this:

“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

My Bokononist warning is this:

Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion
can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.

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