Cat's Cradle Analysis

Words: 1603
Pages: 7

“I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different.” (Vonnegut, A Man Without a Country). Cat’s Cradle is a book written by Kurt Vonnegut in 1963. This book has many lessons to teach through its use of unbelievable characters, a made-up religion, and the apocalypse. This book has one message in particular that shines through the others. That message consists of the fact that life is a game. This does not mean that life is futile, but it means that there are winners and losers, even if there is no objective way to win. This book shows us that those which are considered winners are those that learn from their mistakes and realize what they can and can’t do. As a human race it is in our nature to repeat …show more content…
One of these situations is that of Bokonon. He is the one that ramped up the game for many of the characters involved in the story, intentionally and not. Through his religious and political scheming on the island of San Lorenzo, he got his game of life to overlap with many other people’s games. This came first through bokononism, though. He used this to make people use little lies, or fomas, to make their lives better. In this way he also contributed to the advancement of the second law, as these people tried to lie to balance their lives, and all it does is cause more chaos when the truth is spread so thin. The way that he contributed to the third law is most easily seen when he convinces most of his bokononist followers on San Lorenzo to kill themselves once the Ice 9 was released. He gets all of them to try and escape the game, which of course, they can’t, as they will always be apart of the group of people that ended the