Cat's Cradle

The narrator, researching a book about the day the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, tracks down the surviving children of Felix Hoenikker, one of the bomb's co-inventors, and finds a man better characterized by what he didn't care about than by what he built. Hoenikker plays cat's cradle with young Newt shortly before his death, an image Vonnegut returns to as the book's real diagnosis: 'No damn cat. No damn cradle.' Every explanation adults offer children, and offer each other, turns out to be exactly that kind of string figure, elaborate scaffolding around an absence. Hoenikker's last invention, ice-nine, a crystal that turns any water it touches into solid ice at room temperature, gets left behind for his three children to casually divide among themselves like family china, pure incurious genius handed down with no instructions about consequence.

Bokononism, the religion practiced on the island of San Lorenzo, announces its own falseness in its first line: 'All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.' Unlike a faith that insists on its own truth, Bokononism sells itself openly as foma, harmless untruths people need in order to live with dignity, and it survives specifically because San Lorenzo's dictator, Papa Monzano, has outlawed it on pain of the hook, keeping belief urgent and defiant rather than official and dull. Vonnegut's blackest joke is that a religion which admits it's lying comforts its people more honestly than the bomb-building science that insists its own truths are neutral and safe.

Bokonon supplies two terms Vonnegut clearly thinks the language needed: a karass, a group of people doing God's will together without ever being able to see the pattern, and a granfalloon, a false, proud team like a nation or a fraternity that only feels significant. The narrator's own research project, meant to be a sober history of a single day in 1945, turns out to have assembled his karass without his permission or knowledge, every character he meets along the way bound to him by a logic no census or nationality could have predicted.