Cat's Cradle Literary Analysis

Have you experienced the complete opposite of a love letter? Well, the novel Cat’s Cradle is just that, addressed to American society, and signed by author Kurt Vonnegut, In the novel, Jonah, the narrator, encounter’s multiple Americans on his trip to the island of San Lorenzo whom each have stories that are shared with Jonah, a working journalist. In this novel, Vonnegut showcases absurd characteristics, that are common among Americans, in order to express his opinion that American society is simply awful. He accomplishes this through the use of motivation, dialogue, and episodes.

The American characteristics of the over-prioritizations of one’s public image and the personal gain over the well being of others are demonstrated by Vonnegut
At one point in the novel, Jonah is on a flight to San Lorenzo Island, when he meets H. Lowe and Hazel Crosby. They’re an American couple, of whom the wife, is excited to learn that Jonah is a fellow Indiana native, also known as a “hoosier”. He has Claire say, “‘Lowe and I’ve been around the world twice’... ‘You can't go anywhere a Hoosier hasn’t made his mark’... ‘The man who wrote Ben Hur was a Hoosier.’... ‘Lincoln was a Hoosier, too.’”(90). Hazel Crosby’s dialogue exposes a common fear among many Americans known as Xenophobia- the fear of things that are foreign. Most people, when traveling somewhere that is new or foreign, require a small memento from home for comfort, Hazel however needs the assurance that the place has been greatly influenced by one of their own. In this conversation, Hazel produces a fairly lengthy list of well known Hoosiers. This shows that knowing that there are people like her, and that she will be surrounded by her own norm is an obsession of hers that she seeks comfort in. Another example of dialogue used by Vonnegut to show the absurdity of some common American characteristics comes from later into Jonah’s conversation with the Hazel Crosby, on the flight to San Lorenzo. The two exchange, “‘We Hoosiers got to stick together….Whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, “You call me Mom.”’ ‘Uh huh.’ ‘Let me hear you say it.’
In the beginning of the novel, Newt Hoenikker writes a letter that describes a memory of his sister, Angela, finding him hiding in a bush after being scared by his father, the scientist who invented the atomic bomb dropped by the U.S.. Newt writes, “I just kept saying over and over again how ugly he was and how much I hated him. So she slapped me. ‘How dare you say that about your father?...He’s one of the greatest men who ever lived!’”(16). In this episode, Angela is displayed as performing an extreme defence of her father and his reputation (even against her child brother), regardless of the fact that he created a weapon responsible for the death of thousands of innocent people. Even with her father being characterized as a detached man without any sense of morals, she casts those faults aside and insistently depicts him as a hero. Many Americans practice this selective ignorance in politics today, and many practiced it during the actual bombing of Japan, during World War II. Another example of episodes being used by Vonnegut to show Americans’ denial of any wrongdoing is when the Minton’s tell Jonah about when Horlick was fired by the U.S. State Department after his wife’s letter was published, that said that the U.S. was not loved unconditionally by the whole world. “‘I got him fired,’ said his wife. ‘The only piece of evidence produced against him was a