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Cat's Cradle - School Essays

Cat's Cradle

As John, the narrator, researches the background for his book on the atomic bomb, he becomes fascinated by Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Hoenikker is the archetypal scientist, isolated from human contact, dedicated to his work, and completely without moral awareness. Like the child's game cat's cradle, which is meant to amuse but only terrifies his son, Hoenikker's scientific games are anything but harmless.

Ironically the atomic bomb is not even Hoenikker's most devastating creation. Working on the rather innocuous problem of how to get soldiers out of the mud, he synthesizes "ice-nine," which is both better and worse than expected: It would freeze the water so soldiers stuck in the mud could ...

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Mankind continually refuses to acknowledge what may be called its terminal stupidity and therefore perpetually threatens its own existence.

There are a few positive forces in the novel, but each is undermined. Love, for example, is presented as a worthy but impossible, even comical ideal, symbolized by Mona Monzano and her insatiable habit of making love only by rubbing bare feet with another. Bokononism, a religious philosophy expounded throughout the volume, usefully focuses on man as sacred but is of limited comfort and no help in saving the world. Cat's Cradle is not a dreary book, since it is constantly enlivened by Vonnegut's wild humor and inventive style, but it is far from optimistic about man's fate. Vonnegut's vision of mankind's unintentional self-destruction, for all its exaggeration, may well be ...

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 4/6/2011 06:49:39 PM
Submitted By: kphilip
Category: Book Reports
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 332
Pages: 2

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