The Gospel of Vonnegut

If Cat’s Cradle can be considered Vonnegut’s commentary on the use(lessness) of religion, his narrator is the epitome of a prophet. Instantly, in the introduction of the narrator’s name(s), the reader becomes aware of his connections to Christianity.

The character’s preferred name, Jonah, alludes to the parable of Jonah and the Whale. In the parable, God told Jonah to preach repentance to a sinful city – but Jonah does the opposite, essentially running away from his God. He nearly dies in a storm of his Lord’s wrath, but is saved from drowning when God sends a whale to swallow him up. In essence, Vonnegut does the same with his Jonah, who himself admits, repeatedly, that he is subject to the will of a higher power (i.e., page one’s “somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail”). This journey of fate leads him to the doomed island of San Lorenzo, where he endures that very doom in the form of a mini-apocalypse that kills all but a handful of the island’s people. Jonah’s ‘whale’, then, is his physical location during the landslide – mere inches away from “the ragged rim of oblivion” (259).  

The character’s ‘real’ name, John, is also shared with a Biblical prophet. The author of the Bible’s Gospel of John is also traditionally regarded to be the author of the book of Revelation as well – the New Testament’s final tale of the apocalypse. This, too, parallels Cat’s Cradle – the narrator is sent on a ‘divine’ journey of his own conversion from Christianity to Bokononism, which ends with a mini-apocalypse in the destruction of San Lorenzo.  

The novel culminates with Jonah/John face-to-face with his ‘god,’ meeting Bokonon on a rock. There, Bokonon admits that “the time for the final sentence has come.” Bokonon’s final sentence is, appropriately, a summation of the message of his books as a whole: that life is futile, that humankind is stupid. Bokonon’s last sentence begins with the phrase “If I were a younger man…” (287), strikingly similar to how the narrator begins his own narration: “Listen: when I was a younger man...” (1). It almost seems that Jonah and Bokonon are one, both writing about the ‘parable’ of ice-nine and San Lorenzo as commentary on the stupidity of human nature – Cat’s Cradle, the story of an epic quest of human foolishness and its disastrous end result, is Jonah’s own Book of Bokonon. Bokonon need not write his final sentence – in the telling of Cat’s Cradle, Jonah has done it for him.