I No Longer Know

For me one of the most simultaneously intriguing and frustrating lines in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is when the secretary at Dr. Breed’s company describes her experience with Dr. Hoenikker. She tells John, “There was one where he bet I couldn’t tell him anything absolutely true. So I said to him, ‘God is love’.” To this Hoenikker replied, “What is God? What is love?” (page 55).

Throughout the entire novel Vonnegut forces his reader into a spinning vortex to distort the perspective of the reader. He allows the reader just enough solidarity to follow the text while simultaneously depriving him of any stability in which to obtain a comfortable perspective. The reader, however, cannot complain because what else could he expect of an author who teases, before the book even begins, “Nothing in this book is true.”

This statement serves as a sort of cruel warning, confusing the reader about what it refers to and how the writer views the definition of truth. Vonnegut’s novel serves as a commentary on the perspective of truth, especially through the interaction between the secretary and Dr. Hoenikker, which is why the exchange is so at once intriguing and frustrating. The secretary, like so many other characters in the novel, is simply trying to understand something that cannot be solved. Hoenikker might as well be asking the secretary “What is truth”, which is what the reader struggles to ascertain. Vonnegut purposely includes this in the novel to emphasize the foolishness of man, an expansive theme on which he focuses the entire novel. The characters in the novel are constantly trying to ascertain the purpose of something, but never succeeding.

You would think that Vonnegut’s emphasis on this idea would deter me from making the same mistakes as the characters; however, it does not. I wonder now, more than ever, “What is truth”. I try to think of an idea that is absolutely true, but fall short of doing so. I realize that anything that I view as being true is not necessarily held in the same esteem by anyone else. I have also begun to second-guess the stories I tell. I realize that to me, they are all true. I relate the story as I saw it, from my point of view, including details which I deem important. But is this story true? I consider now how another participant may have viewed the occurrence and acknowledge that his story would undoubtedly be slightly different from mine. But how different? What details would change? Would my ‘hero’ be his ‘villain’, and his ‘hero’ be my ‘villain’? “Where does the truth lie?” I guess the only answer to that is, ‘I no longer know’.