Fourth Post

Now that I have finished the book, I suppose that I should do at least one summary-type blog so that you guys know what’s going on. I’ll highlight the main events, but if you want a more in-depth summary, check out Sparknotes, or better yet, read the book itself. It’s good.

The first part of the book is mostly exposition, which is where most of the previous blogs fit in. As we already know, John’s mission to write a book about the atomic bomb prompts him to contact people in order to find information about Dr. Felix Hoenikker. He first contacts Newt, and learns about Felix’s life at home with his three children, Frank, Angela, and Newt. Later he travels to Illium, the city where the Hoenikkers used to live, and meets with Dr. Asa Breed, Felix’s supervisor. There, he learns about Felix’s wife (who died a while back), Felix’s work, and ice-nine. Dr. Breed claims that ice-nine was never created, but we are told that Felix had actually successfully created a bit of ice-nine before he died, and the pieces were split between his children. John will discover this later.

John is hired to write an article about Julian Castle, a philanthropist on the island of San Lorenzo. On the plane ride there, John meet Hazel and Lowe Crosby who are looking to move their bicycle business to San Lorenzo due to labor regulations in the U.S. John also meet Newt and Angela who are on their way to San Lorenzo to celebrate Frank’s engagement to Mona. Frank is now the Major General of San Lorenzo, and Mona is the beautiful adopted daughter of “Papa” Monzano, the island’s dictator.

Upon arriving at San Lorenzo, John learns about its history. He discovers that when Bokonon and McCabe originally landed on the island, McCabe became the ruler, while Bokonon developed his own religion called Bokononism. John falls in love with Mona, who is a sex symbol in San Lorenzo due to her beauty. ”Papa” Monzano falls gravely ill, and if he dies Frank will be next in line for the position of President. However, Frank is not interested in taking on such a public roll since he is extremely socially awkward and asks John to take his place. Since a perk of the job is marrying Mona (who is predicted by the Books of Bokonon to marry the next President of San Lorenzo), John agrees.

The next day, San Lorenzo prepares to celebrate The Day of the Hundred Martyrs to Democracy. “Papa” Monzano dies, but his doctor is perplexed as to the cause of death. Upon further examination, John realizes that “Papa” Monzano had committed suicide by touching ice-nine to his lips, which instantly froze all of the liquid in his body. By examining “Papa” Manzano’s body, the doctor had unknowingly picked up particles of ice-nine onto his hands. When he goes to the sink to wash his hands, all of the water in the sink freezes. Before John can stop him, the doctor places his finger to his lips out of curiosity and his entire body freezes as well.

After John’s realizes that ice-nine had successfully been created, he orders Frank, Newt, and Angela into the room and demands confessions from them. In order to prevent any ice-nine from potentially making its way into a major body of water, they decide to blowtorch areas of room and burn the bodies. However, they decide to put off the bodies until after the ceremony. During the ceremony, one of the planes crash into the cliff below “Papa” Monzano’s castle, and the house along with the frozen bodies all tumble into the ocean below, causing all of Earth’s water to instantly freeze into ice-nine.

Soon after, most of the island’s inhabitants, including Mona, commit suicide with ice-nine. For the next six months, only John, Frank, Newt, and the Crosby’s are alive. With nowhere to go, John finishes his book. When he and Newt journey up Mount McCabe, John finally meets Bokonon, who is sitting by the side of the road writing the last sentence of the Books of Bokonon:

“If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.” (p.287)

Third Post

In this blog post, I’m just going to share my thoughts on a couple of parts from the book.

Julian Castle, an American sugar millionaire…had, at the age of forty, followed the example of Dr. Albert Schweitzer by founding a free hospital in a jungle, by devoting his life to miserable folk of another race. Castle’s hospital was called the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle...When I flew to San Lorenzo, Julian Castle was sixty years old. He had been absolutely unselfish for twenty years. In his selfish days he had been as familiar to tabloid readers as Tommy Manville, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Barbara Hutton. His fame had rested on lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion. (p.84)

At first, I had thought it was entirely superficial to describe Julian Castle as “absolutely unselfish for twenty years”. Like most would, I assumed that the true Julian Castle consisted of the lechery, alcoholism, reckless driving, and draft evasion that characterized the first forty years of his life. But is a person’s true identity wholly defined by their external actions or inner feelings? Their past or their present? If Adolf Hitler had waken up one day many years after WWII and realized the enormity of what he had done, and essentially viewed himself, his actions, and the world around him with the same perspective as any one of us would, would he be a terrible person at that moment? There is no doubt that he was a terrible person who had committed unforgivable crimes in the past, but I would argue that his new self, which would recoil from the thought of even killing one Jew, can be legitimately considered to be a good person. Of course, the only problem in our society is the difficulty of assessing whether one’s supposed turnaround is genuine or not.

Vonnegut also makes several comments on crime and punishment:

“You know what the punishment is for stealing something?” 

“Nope.” 

“The hook,” he said. “No fines, no probation, no thirty days in jail. It’s the hook. The hook for stealing, for murder, for arson, for treason, for rape, for being a peeping Tom. Break a law—any damn law at all—and it’s the hook. Everybody can understand that, and San Lorenzo is the best-behaved country in the world.” 

“What is the hook?” 

“They put up a gallows, see? Two posts and a cross beam. And then they take a great big kind of iron fishhook and they hang it down from the cross beam. Then they take somebody who’s dumb enough to break the law, and they put the point of the hook in through one side of his belly and out the other and they let him go—and there he hangs, by God, one damn sorry law-breaker.” 

“Good God!” (p.93)

Overarching all criminal punishments are four philosophical and moral justifications that had been established early in the history of criminal law. These are retribution, incapacitation, rehabilitation, and deterrence. Retribution is perhaps the most rudimentary justification for crime, emphasizing that all criminal actions should be punished. However, a philosophy known as lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye”, also states that the severity of a crime should correspond directly to the severity of punishment. The death penalty is the most severe punishment in a legal institution, is only reserved for the worst crimes.

Perhaps it’s a little over the top, but what if the harshest punishments were doled out for ALL crimes? From a purely philosophical perspective, I think that this would be an extremely effective way to deal with crime. I’m not trying to say that we must kill little kids for stealing candy bars. My point is that instead of emphasizing that you absolutely cannot commit certain crimes, while other crimes are merely frowned upon, we should emphasize a zero tolerance on any crime. If makes sense to say that killing someone is absolutely horrible, while taking a candy bar isn’t as serious, but the whole idea is that all crime should be avoided anyway, major or minor. There’s no such thing as “legitimate crime”. If the crime is justified, then it’s not really a crime. If a child accidently steals something without knowing it’s wrong, then it’s not really a crime. In an ideal world, capital punishment for all intentional crimes is justified. There is one legitimate counterargument against this however, as Vonnegut points out a couple pages later:

“What was the next thing?” 

“It was an iron chair a man had been roasted alive in,” said Crosby. “He was roasted for murdering his son.” 

“Only, after they roasted him,” Hazel recalled blandly, “they found out he hadn’t murdered his son after all.” (p.95)

Finally, I think that Vonnegut did a good job with incorporating ice-nine as a central plot element. Since Vonnegut’s whole argument is about truth versus lies and science versus religion, it’s really important that ice-nine (representing science and truth) is fairly credible, and Vonnegut achieves this with his detailed scientific explanations of how ice-nine works. Here is an excerpt:

“There are several ways,” Dr. Breed said to me, “in which certain liquids can crystallize—can freeze— several ways in which their atoms can stack and lock in an orderly, rigid way…So it is with atoms in crystals, too; and two different crystals of the same substance can have quite different physical properties.”“Now think about cannonballs on a courthouse lawn or about oranges in a crate again,” he suggested... “The bottom layer is the seed of how every cannonball or every orange that comes after is going to behave, even to an infinite number of cannonballs or oranges.”“Now suppose,” chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, “that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. Suppose that the sort of ice we skate upon and put into highballs—what we might call ice-one—is only one of several types of ice. Suppose water always froze as ice-one on Earth because it had never had a seed to teach it how to form ice-two, ice-three, ice-four …? And suppose,” he rapped on his desk with his old hand again, “that there were one form, which we will call ice-nine—a crystal as hard as this desk—with a melting point of, let us say, one-hundred degrees Fahrenheit, or, better still, a melting point of one-hundred-and-thirty degrees.” (p.45)

Second Post

In my previous blog post, I talked about how Vonnegut addresses the human and moral aspects of scientific research. Another thing that Vonnegut discusses is the role of religion. In the first couple of chapters, John presents a religion called Bokononism, of which he is a believer and member. One of the basic concepts of Bokononism is the karass, which is a group or team of people that is organized by God to do his will, although they never actually discover what it is that they’re doing. In this passage, John explains a couple of things in terms of Bokononism:

About my karass, then. It surely includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of the so-called “Fathers” of the first atomic bomb. Dr. Hoenikker himself was no doubt a member of my karass, though he was dead before my sinookas, the tendrils of my life, began to tangle with those of his children.  (p.6)

Vonnegut isn’t merely mocking religion, but rather making a point about its purpose – to explain life and give it meaning, though not necessarily truthfully. Consider the following passage:

The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this: “All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.” My Bokononist warning is this: Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either. So be it. (p.5)

With this point, I believe Vonnegut presents religion as a direct contrast to science in that religion serves the purpose of human prosperity and content at the expense of truth, while science serves the purpose of truth and knowledge, though sometimes at the expense of humanity. Vonnegut also points out that while religion often focuses heavily on morality, morals are often cast aside in the quest for scientific knowledge:

“After the thing went off, after it was a sure thing that America could wipe out a city with just one bomb, a scientist turned to Father and said, ‘Science has now known sin.’ And do you know what Father said? He said, ‘What is sin?’” (p.17)

First Post

After reading a good thirty-four chapters of this book, I can say that I am excited to once again delve into one of Vonnegut’s classic adventures. His writing style is extremely recognizable, and so far I’m enjoying Cat’s Cradle as much as I enjoyed Breakfast of Champions. This book, like Breakfast of Champions, is a “satirical commentary on modern man”

The story is told through the perspective of a narrator who is a character in the story himself. His name is John, or Jonah, and his story is about his journey writing a book called “The Day the World Ended”. The book is about the development of the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. While gathering research for his book, John contacts Newt Hoenikker, son of scientist Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Felix Hoenikker was one of the major contributors to the development of the atomic bomb.

Throughout the beginning of the book, we find out that the Hoenikkers are an extremely troubled family. Felix is viewed by society as a harmless, gentle, and innocent man, but in truth, he is a man so devoid of emotion and love that he has neglected his wife and family. After his wife died, he had pulled his daughter, Angela, out of high school so that he could “go on having some woman to take care of him”. Throughout much of his life, Felix worked as a scientist in the General Forge and Foundry Company under his supervisor, Dr. Asa Breed.

While visiting Dr. Breed, John learns about a particularly fascinating substance called ice-nine. A marine soldier had approached Felix one day with the problem of moving through swamps and mud, to which Felix proposed the possible solution of ice-nine, a crystal of water molecules in such an arrangement that the water became solid at room temperature and all of the water it touched crystalized into ice-nine as well. Under this idea, one tiny grain of ice-nine could theoretically “freeze” all of the world’s connected water supplies within a brief moment. After some discussion with Dr. Breed, it is clear to John that such a discovery, like the atomic bomb, could pose catastrophic consequences for the entire world. Dr. Breed claims that such a substance was merely theorized and never actually created, but he is mistaken. Before he died, Felix had made a chip of ice-nine and split it with his children. It had a melting point of one-hundred-fourteen-point-four-degrees Fahrenheit. This means that if the water in a human body were to ever crystalize into ice-nine, he would have to be cooked past 114.4 degrees, effectively killing him, in order to be melted.

Through the creation of the atomic bomb and the fictional ice-nine, Vonnegut satirizes scientists and their quest for knowledge whilst disregarding the real-life consequences of such knowledge. Vonnegut proposes that scientists hold responsibility not only for truth, but also the moral implications of how that truth could be potentially used for good or bad. I’m not entirely sure that I agree with this point, because from my point of view, I believe that progress and discovery will happen anyway. The atomic bomb, for examples, utilizes nuclear fission to release massive amounts of nuclear energy. Such knowledge is so fundamental to physics and chemistry that its discovery and application would have been inevitable.