Cat's Cradle

Daniel Truong
Gallagher
English 12 CP, Period 6
12 January 2009

Cat’s Cradle


Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Cat’s Cradle the author raises the question of what do people do to seem evil and answers the question simply, to an extent by human carelessness. He asks this question by making the antagonists the Hoenikker family in the novel, making them appear innocent and just, searching for happiness using the ice-nine, and yet the characters who ultimately, lead to the death of almost every living thing would not be considered “bad” or “evil”, but careless in what they were trying to pursue, which was happiness using the dangerous ice-nine. The author uses ironies and a bit of humor to answer his question of what is evil.

The father of the Hoenikker family and the atom bomb, Felix Hoenikker, is not what anyone at all would be considered “evil”. In his spare time he spent his time playing with strings and whatever else he could find, yet he was the father of the atom bomb, one of the most destructive inventions in the history of mankind. He also creates ice-nine which in the end of the novel destroys the ecosystem of the planet and leads to the death of everyone on earth, yet is he what anyone would consider evil. Felix Hoenikker would be considered nothing but a big child by anyone who knew him. All anyone had to do to make him concentrate on the bomb was take away his strong he would always play with to make him continue his work on the atom bomb. “put quote here”. But it is not his maturity or the innocent way he acts that makes him evil. It is his actions and his creations that lead to the deaths of thousands of people, due to his bomb, and ultimately, the whole world, due to ice-nine


The author suggests that people in society are too careless and blame their carelessness on human error too often. He does this by creating an allusion to the song rock a bye baby that Felix Hoenikker sings to his kid. “Rockabye catsy, in the tree top’; he sang, ‘When the wind blows, the cray-dull will rock. If the bough breaks, the craydull will fall. Down will come cray-dull, catsy and all.” (Vonnegut 18) when Felix sings this song his kid runs out of the house crying. The song foreshadows the end of the book when everything falls out of order The author shows us how though innocent Felix Hoenikker is an evil man. “His pores looked as big as craters on the moon. His ears and nostrils stuffed with hair. Cigar smoke made him smell like the mouth of hell. So close up my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. I dream about it all the time.” This is when Newt is describing his father while he tries to play with him. The author describes Felix in such an ugly way to show that newt’s father is indeed, evil, yet the father just tried to do was play with his own child. When the auther talks about Felix Hoenikker, Felix represents people, or society. When the author talks about Felix’s pores which are big holes on his face, it’s an allusion to the ideas of society, and how incompletely they are thought through and are careless, and how some human ideas have big holes in them, as they are not thought through. Newt then goes on to talk about his ears and nose stuffed with hair as if society is not willing to listen to each other when thinking about ideas and discussing them. The hair blocking the nose is just like people blocking each other out. Newt then describes the cigar smoke, which represents the outcome of the poorly thought through ideas of society and people. Felix is smoking a cigar, which is hurting him because cigars are very unhealthy, just as a poorly thought through idea could damage to society.