Fact or Fiction?

            While the reader may be experiencing the novel's events as the pages turn, the characters in Cat’s Cradle are not. The narrative we are reading is Jonah’s retelling of these events as they occurred in his own life. This removed frame of narrative is fact interspersed with Jonah’s personal commentary, generally in the form of hindsight; for example, as he introduces the story we are reading through discussing the story he was writing (a prime example of metatextuality, right on the first page) he laments the notion that he “would have been a Bokonist then…but [it] was unknown” (Vonnegut 2). Because the supposedly factual narrative of Cat’s Cradle’s events is interspersed with Jonah’s own sentiments, it becomes masked by another layer of possible dishonesty – told through a lens of feigned truth clouded by personal biases. Cat’s Cradle, then, becomes Vonnegut’s story of Jonah’s story about how he went about writing his own story, The Day the World Ended – fiction written through Jonah’s fact-and-fiction narrative about the real “truth,” the actual events occurring in the novel.

            This idea of layering of fiction over fact continues in Supernatural’s “The Monster at the End of this Book.” In this episode, the lives the Winchester brothers believed they themselves controlled became mere stories, fiction penned by a writer named Chuck Shurley – later exposed as a prophet of God. In this case, Sam and Dean were living a life that was actually fiction, penned by a writer whose own reality was revealed to be controlled by an even higher power – a god spinning fiction (fate) from his own ideas, “writing” the roles for these characters to play.

            This additional aspect blurring fact and fiction exists in Cat’s Cradle as well, in the novel’s other instance of metatextuality, Jonah’s repeated discussion of the book that governs his life: The Book of Bokonon. Both Chuck Shurley and Bokonon are mortal men, but have a distinctive, deep connection to a higher power – and both men serve to blur the line between fact and fiction in their ability to control the fates of the Winchester brothers and Jonah, respectively. Each of these characters believes that their actions, their thoughts, their feelings, and the consequences that come of the three are what forge their own reality. However, this notion of life’s apparent “truth” is shattered when the puppeteers who actually spin these characters’ fates are revealed. The Winchester brothers cannot make decisions that go against Chuck's writing, and Jonah himself admits that "God Almighty had some pretty elaborate plans for me" (69), repeatedly believing that the events in his life (meeting members of his karass on the plane, having his vin-dit in the graveyard) are direct results of his destiny, weaved by God, "as it was supposed to happen" (84), as Bokonon would have said. All of this raises the question: is the life these characters know truly reality, or does the notion of fate establish life as fiction, the Earth’s inhabitants as vessels acting out the stories already written by a higher power?