Kurt Vonnegut is a man best known for being that sardonic ass hole with just enough wit sprinkled throughout his vicarious observations of culture to mask his anxious contempt for modern existence.

 

In Kurt’s novel, Cats Cradle, we find a protagonist with no official name retelling his story of how the world froze over due to mankind’s inability to observe our mistakes through the means of hindsight.

 

Aside from Slaughter House Five this is essentially his most well-known and revered novel. If you find the time to shuffle on over to Mr. Vonnegut’s Wikipedia Page (yea he’s that damn famous) you can find a list of his works in which he provides a personal self-assessment. In said list Kurt is very honest about his sentiments towards his writing and even I myself agree with the ‘A-plus’ Cat’s Cradle receives.

 

Much like many of Kurt’s work, as with most genuine authors, Cat’s Cradle will not be found in your High School or potentially even college library. It’s a book that has been condemned by enough people due to its disturbing nature of apocalyptic premonitions and satirically blasphemous nods which are conveyed through a fictional religion in Cat’s Cradle known as Bokononism.

 

To me this is a tragedy. Authors, critics and scholars rejoice at the book that won Kurt his Master’s Degree in Anthropology from the University of Chicago and yet we hide novels such as this from our youthful generations sight in a desperate attempt to protect them from what Kurt revered as the cruel, appalling and sometimes comical truths about human character and tendencies.

 

Towards the end of this novel the narrator/protagonist has a brief conversation with a secondary character about his father (also the father of the atomic bomb in the books reality) and how during his research he would often play with a piece of string, making the Cat’s Cradle out of it and presenting it to his children gleefully.

 

It’s at this point that the character remarks to the protagonist about why himself and many other kids grow up ‘crazy’. It’s because they look into the loops of twine attempting to see what the creator has developed, but all they can say is; “No Damn Cat, No Damn Cradle”.

 

Regardless of Vonnegut’s intended metaphor for this I can’t help but feel it’s relation to how this book is currently revered. Hiding in plain sight from the eyes of the ill informed. We’re unable to look at our past failures and adopt them as a means for change. We’re too caught up in trying to find something valuable in everything, that we miss the beauty of the abstract. The incredible wonder that is the cat sitting in the string cradle.