Moby Dick is the story of a futile journey of a crew on a whaling vessel. When Vonnegut starts his book with the pretext “Nothing in this book is true,” he sets up the reader to a similarly futile journey to figure out what is truth and what is not and, throughout, asks the reader to decide whether it matters.
If we only believe things that we know for certain to be true, we may find ourselves not believing in very much. True reality is objectified as the string in the cat’s cradle game; the same circular string can be morphed into and perceived as an infinite number of complex shapes. If reality can be perceived at different times and by different people as so many different things, is there any one true form?
The narrator has given up on his quest to figure this out. He has taken up the Bokononist perspective to “Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy,” and asks the reader to determine whether or not he/she will do the same. A search for the truth may result in the end of the world as we know it because we might find out that we don’t truly know anything about the world.
In Moby Dick, we call Ahab a mad-man for chasing the whale; would we be just as insane for chasing the truth?
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