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Cat's Cradle: A Novel

Page 19

by Kurt Vonnegut


  Vonnegut took an advertising job at General Electric to support his family but began writing short fiction on the side. During this time Kurt and Jane had two more children, Edith and Nanette. Vonnegut redoubled his efforts to publish his stories. In 1952 his dystopian apprentice novel Player Piano was published. Vonnegut’s beloved sister Alice Adams died of cancer in 1957, just two days after her husband had been killed in a freak commuter train crash. Kurt and Jane took in three of Alice’s children, doubling the size of their family overnight. It became more imperative for Vonnegut to bring in more money.

  Within 10 years following the arrival of the Adams boys, the short-story market was drying up, and Vonnegut turned his attention to novels. Vonnegut published the whimsical sci-fi epic The Sirens of Titan; the spy novel, Mother Night; a fanciful anthropological satire of religion, Cat’s Cradle; a critique of economic injustice, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater; and in 1969 his Dresden novel, Slaughterhouse-Five. In these books, he mastered his trademark black comic voice, making his audience laugh despite the horrors he described. Vonnegut had already developed a cult following of college students, but he broke through to a mass audience with Slaughterhouse-Five and the excellent film version of the novel that soon followed. By the early 1970s, Vonnegut was one of the most famous, living writers on earth.

  Yet, the 1970s proved a difficult time for Vonnegut. After his children grew up and left home, his long marriage to Jane fell apart. He moved alone from Cape Cod to New York City, became withdrawn and depressed and suffered from writer’s block. His son Mark suffered a bipolar disorder breakdown early in the decade but recovered to write a book about it called The Eden Express. The disintegration of families became a major theme in Vonnegut’s two novels in the middle 1970s, Breakfast of Champions and Slapstick. While not altogether successful as fiction, these books helped Vonnegut work through the emotional problems that had plagued him since childhood.

  In the 1980s Vonnegut entered a second major phase of his career. His 1979 marriage to photographer Jill Krementz formalized their relationship of several years, and the social realist novels Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Bluebeard showed a remarkable resurgence of Vonnegut’s career after the critical backlash he had suffered in the 1970s. His novel Galapagos was a brilliant look at Vonnegut’s concerns that the “oversized human brain” was ironically leading mankind to possible extinction. At this time Vonnegut also published his third major collection of essays, Palm Sunday. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Vonnegut acted as a powerful spokesman for the preservation of our Constitutional freedoms, for nuclear arms control and for the protection of the earth’s fragile biosphere.

  As this new century began, Vonnegut continued to try to be, as he said, “a responsible elder in our society,” decrying the militarization of our county after the terrorist attacks of 2001. In his last novel, Timequake, and in his last collection of essays, A Man without a Country, Vonnegut powerfully expressed his sense that corporate greed, overpopulation, and war would in the end win out over simple humanity. As he ruefully apologized to those who would come after him, “We could have saved the world, but we were just too damned lazy.”

  Kurt Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007 after a fall on the steps of his New York brownstone. He was mourned the world over as one of the great American writers of the second half of the 20th Century.

  BOOKS BY KURT VONNEGUT

  Bluebeard

  Breakfast of Champions

  Cat’s Cradle

  Deadeye Dick

  Galapagos

  God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater

  Jailbird

  Mother Night

  Palm Sunday

  Player Piano

  The Sirens of Titan

  Slapstick

  Slaughterhouse-Five

  Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons

  Welcome to the Monkey House

  Table of Contents

  CONTENTS

  1 THE DAY THE WORLD ENDED

  2 NICE, NICE, VERY NICE

  3 FOLLY

  4 A TENTATIVE TANGLING OF TENDRILS

  5 LETTER FROM A PRE-MED

  6 BUG FIGHTS

  7 THE ILLUSTRIOUS HOENIKKERS

  8 NEWT’S THING WITH ZINKA

  9 VICE-PRESIDENT IN CHARGE OF VOLCANOES

  10 SECRET AGENT X-9

  11 PROTEIN

  12 END OF THE WORLD DELIGHT

  13 THE JUMPING-OFF PLACE

  14 WHEN AUTOMOBILES HAD CUT-GLASS VASES

  15 MERRY CHRISTMAS

  16 BACK TO KINDERGARTEN

  17 THE GIRL POOL

  18 THE MOST VALUABLE COMMODITY ON EARTH

  19 NO MORE MUD

  20 ICE-NINE

  21 THE MARINES MARCH ON

  22 MEMBER OF THE YELLOW PRESS

  23 THE LAST BATCH OF BROWNIES

  24 WHAT A WAMPETER IS

  25 THE MAIN THING ABOUT DR. HOENIKKER

  26 WHAT GOD IS

  27 MEN FROM MARS

  28 MAYONNAISE

  29 GONE, BUT NOT FORGOTTEN

  30 ONLY SLEEPING

  31 ANOTHER BREED

  32 DYNAMITE MONEY

  33 AN UNGRATEFUL MAN

  34 VIN-DIT

  35 HOBBY SHOP

  36 MEOW

  37 A MODERN MAJOR GENERAL

  38 BARRACUDA CAPITAL OF THE WORLD

  39 FATA MORGANA

  40 HOUSE OF HOPE AND MERCY

  41 A KARASS BUILT FOR TWO

  42 BICYCLES FOR AFGHANISTAN

  43 THE DEMONSTRATOR

  44 COMMUNIST SYMPATHIZERS

  45 WHY AMERICANS ARE HATED

  46 THE BOKONONIST METHOD FOR HANDLING CAESAR

  47 DYNAMIC TENSION

  48 JUST LIKE SAINT AUGUSTINE

  49 A FISH PITCHED UP BY AN ANGRY SEA

  50 A NICE MIDGET

  51 O.K., MOM

  52 NO PAIN

  53 THE PRESIDENT OF FABRI-TEK

  54 COMMUNISTS, NAZIS, ROYALISTS, PARACHUTISTS, AND DRAFT DODGERS

  55 NEVER INDEX YOUR OWN BOOK

  56 A SELF-SUPPORTING SQUIRREL CAGE

  57 THE QUEASY DREAM

  58 TYRANNY WITH A DIFFERENCE

  59 FASTEN YOUR SEAT BELTS

  60 AN UNDERPRIVILEGED NATION

  61 WHAT A CORPORAL WAS WORTH

  62 WHY HAZEL WASN’T SCARED

  63 REVERENT AND FREE

  64 PEACE AND PLENTY

  65 A GOOD TIME TO COME TO SAN LORENZO

  66 THE STRONGEST THING THERE IS

  67 HY-U-O-OOK-KUH!

  68 HOON-YERA MORA-TOORZ

  69 A BIG MOSAIC

  70 TUTORED BY BOKONON

  71 THE HAPPINESS OF BEING AN AMERICAN

  72 THE PISSANT HILTON

  73 BLACK DEATH

  74 CAT’S CRADLE

  75 GIVE MY REGARDS TO ALBERT SCHWEITZER

  76 JULIAN CASTLE AGREES WITH NEWT THAT EVERYTHING IS MEANINGLESS

  77 ASPIRIN AND BOKO-MARU

  78 RING OF STEEL

  79 WHY McCABE’S SOUL GREW COARSE

  80 THE WATERFALL STRAINERS

  81 A WHITE BRIDE FOR THE SON OF A PULLMAN PORTER

  82 ZAH-MAH-KI-BO

  83 DR. SCHLICHTER VON KOENIGSWALD APPROACHES THE BREAK-EVEN POINT

  84 BLACKOUT

  85 A PACK OF FOMA

  86 TWO LITTLE JUGS

  87 THE CUT OF MY JIB

  88 WHY FRANK COULDN’T BE PRESIDENT

  89 DUFFLE

  90 ONLY ONE CATCH

  91 MONA

  92 ON THE POET’S CELEBRATION OF HIS FIRST BOKO-MARU

  93 HOW I ALMOST LOST MY MOMA

  94 THE HIGHEST MOUNTAIN

  95 I SEE THE HOOK

  96 BELL, BOOK, AND CHICKEN IN A HATBOX

  97 THE STINKING CHRISTIAN

  98 LAST RITES

  99 DYOT MEET MAT

  100 DOWN THE OUBLIETTE GOES FRANK

  101 LIKE MY PREDECESSORS, I OUTLAW BOKONON

  102 ENEMIES OF FREEDOM

  103 A MEDICAL OPINION
ON THE EFFECTS OF A WRITERS’ STRIKE

  104 SULFATHIAZOLE

  105 PAIN-KILLER

  106 WHAT BOKONONISTS SAY WHEN THEY COMMIT SUICIDE

  107 FEAST YOUR EYES!

  108 FRANK TELLS US WHAT TO DO

  109 FRANK DEFENDS HIMSELF

  110 THE FOURTEENTH BOOK

  111 TIME OUT

  112 NEWT’S MOTHER’S RETICULE

  113 HISTORY

  114 WHEN I FELT THE BULLET ENTER MY HEART

  115 AS IT HAPPENED

  116 THE GRAND AH-WHOOM

  117 SANCTUARY

  118 THE IRON MAIDEN AND THE OUBLIETTE

  119 MONA THANKS ME

  120 TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

  121 I AM SLOW TO ANSWER

  122 THE SWISS FAMILY ROBINSON

  123 OF MICE AND MEN

  124 FRANK’S ANT FARM

  125 THE TASMANIANS

  126 SOFT PIPES, PLAY ON

  127 THE END

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 

 


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