No Cat, No Cradle

The book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut is a simply crafted book. The title of the book is a very essential concept within the book. One of the characters, Newt Hoenikker, commented on the children's game of cat's cradle, for which the book is named. He described it, saying, "A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebody's hands...No damn cat, and no damn cradle." (Vonnegut, 166) Here, Newt is explicitly saying that the title for the game is misleading. Vonnegut uses this as a simile for many other things in the book, such as a marriage, someone's personality, and a religion.

(cat's cradle puzzle)

The marriage that Vonnegut suggested was like a cat's cradle, was that of Angela Hoenikker, Newt's older sister. Shortly before Angela displayed her skill with the clarinet, Newt told Jonah, the narrator, that her marriage was actually terrible, to which Jonah replied, "'From the way she talked,' I said, 'I thought it was a very happy marriage.' Little Newt held his hands six inches apart and he spread his fingers. 'See the cat? See the cradle?'" (179). Vonnegut uses repetition to bring the reader's mind back to the scene when Newt talked about cat's cradle before. By doing this, he conveys the idea that even though Angela says that she is married, what relationship she has with her husband has no resemblance to marriage at all.

Frank Hoenikker, Newt and Angela's brother, is portrayed in the beginning of the book as a pathetic, wimpy trouble maker. Supposedly, Frank went down to Florida, and got killed because of a mixup with some gangsters. This impression is given by other people in Ilium, New York, the town in which the Hoenikker family lived, thus giving Vonnegut a chance to contradict this image, in accordance with the cat's cradle theme. The only person that had something good to say about Frank, was Jack, the owner of the hobby shop in Ilium. When talking with Jonah, he talked about Frank's fascination with models, and said, "He'd put a lake where that hill had been and a trestle over the lake, and it would look ten times as good as it did before." (76) Vonnegut here says that Frank was labelled a weird kid, but actually had a remarkable talent with models. But he doesn't leave it at that, he takes the "cat's cradle misnomer" to an even deeper level. Towards the end of the book, Jonah and Frank were talking about what he did at the hobby shop, and Frank said, "I was screwing Jack's wife everyday." (201).

There is the obvious reason why Frank wouldn't want people to know that he was sleeping with Jack's wife, but he gave another reason, saying, "They would have been really surprised––especially the girls––if they'd found out what really went on." (201). The fact that Frank thought about people's reactions to the truth shows that he didn't tell anybody because he didn't want to disturb anyone, and wanted to appear normal. The same thing is true with Angela's situation. She wanted everyone to think that she had a happy, normal marriage, so she lied about it. It was easier for people to deal with the lie that she had a good marriage, than the truth she had a bad one.

With the simile of cat's cradle, Vonnegut shows that people are willing to accept a lie, because most of the time it is easier to deal with than the truth. If the string pattern wasn't called cat's cradle, what else would it be called? A mess of X's? Six triangles and a diamond? Instead of calling the pattern something that is true although more awkward to say, society takes the easy route, and calls it cat's cradle.