Cat's Cradle

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

CALL ME JONAH. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me 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.

And, according to plan, at each appointed second, at each appointed place...

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 C...

I am a Bokonon...

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.

By that he means that a karass ignores national, institutional, occupational, familial, and class boundaries.

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

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...

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

About my karass, then.

It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called “Fathers” of the first atomic bomb.

The first of his heirs to be touched by my sinookas was Newton Hoenikker, the youngest of his three children, the younger of his two sons.

I learned from the publication of my fraternity,

Newton Hoenikker, son of the Nobel Prize physicist, Felix Hoenikker, had been pledged by my c...

You should really ask my brother and sister, who are both older than I am.

My sister is Mrs. Harrison C. Conners,

Nobody knows where my brother Frank is.

He disappeared right after Father’s funeral two years ago, and nobody has heard from him since.

“I was only six years old when they dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, so anything I remember about that day other ...

My sister Angela tells me I used to play with little toy trucks for hours, making motor sounds, going ‘burton, burton, burton’ all the time.

So I guess I was going ‘burton, burton, burton’ on the day of the bomb; and Father was in his study, playing with a loop of string.

“It so happens I know where the string he was playin...

Father took the string from around the manuscript of a novel that a man i...

The novel was about the end of the world in...

It told about how mad scientists made a terrific bomb that wiped ...

He sent the manuscript to Father because he couldn’t figure out what kind of explosives to put in the bomb.

He thought maybe Father could make suggestions.

His fingers made the string figure called a ‘cat’s cradle.’

His father was a tailor, you know, so there must have been thread and string around all the time when Father was a boy.

“Making that cat’s cradle was the closest I ever saw my father come to playing what anybo...

‘Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?’

He all of a sudden came out of his study and did something he’d never done before.

He tried to play with me.

So close up, my father was the ugliest thing I had ever seen.

I don’t have to go to class any more. I was flunked out last week.

I was a pre-med.

They were right to flunk me out. I would have mad...

My sister Angela has told me many times that I really hurt my father that day when I wouldn’t admire the cat’s cradle,

I don’t think I could have hurt him much.

People couldn’t get at him because he just wasn’t interested in people.

I remember one time, about a year before he died, I tried to get him to tell me something about my mother. He coul...

That’s what Frank always used to say when people asked him what he thought he was doing. He always said, ‘Experimenting.’

After the turtle incident, Father got so interested in turtles that he stopped working on the atom bomb. Some people from the Manhattan Project finally came out to the house to ask Angela what to do. She told them to take away Father’s turtles.

He just came to work the next day and looked for things to play with and think about, and everything there was to play with and think about had something to do with the bomb.