Vonnegut's Cat’s Cradle: Contemporary Explorations of the Sublime

Resumen

This paper explores Kurt Vonnegut’s novella Cat’s Cradle, set after the Cuban Missile Crisis and first published in 1963. This science-fiction story has been commonly interpreted as an allegory of the Cold War. The book was also part of Vonnegut’s master degree dissertation in anthropology, defended in 1971. Vonnegut’s background on biochemistry, technology and science was also an important influence on this work. Another aspect that critics have identified as influential is the fact that Vonnegut witnessed the Dresden bombing between Feb.13-15, 1945. Indeed, the title of the book refers to the day Hiroshima was bombed, and the unnamed narrator ponders on the impact of this event upon the lives of American people. The narrative opens with this inquiry and a reference to Nobel laurate physicist Felix Hoenikker, a fictional character supposedly the inventor of the atomic bomb, who is described by his son as playing the cat’s cradle game while the bomb was dropped.