The manipulation: the assignment of reading 148 pages over 6 winter days. Information retention, as such, barely keeps up with the flu season. Note-taking is therefore implicitly recommended, leading to immersion into the world created by Vonnegut and over which he has total control. Tendency to connect people, events, places, to map out a chronological order of this world, to make sense of it, to detect narrative paradoxes and plot holes is therefore extremely high. This then runs us right into the trap which Bokononism observed but never warned: we the readers are trying to discover, to understand, to seek after a ‘truth’ that lies underneath a world of a fabrication, a world that is spoon-fed to us in a pseudo-chronological order (with the help of flashbacks and recollections of events). Vonnegut plays with us like Felix plays with the Cat’s cradles. He spoon-feeds us information like Felix spoon-feeds his knowledge of ice-nine to those around him. Kurt Vonnegut is one self-indulgent son of a bitch. He didn’t make an index of his book. But he might as well have. His way of leaving connected information all over the place alludes to the way one would flip back and forth between the index page and the many pages it keeps record of. I fell into this trap all the way through page 148. I felt enticed, to quote Hozier's religiously satirical song, to "worship like a dog in the shrine of [Kurt's] lies" Case in point, here’s one of my initial blog drafts before realizing this.
Page one, paragraph two: “...somebody or something has compelled me to be certain places at certain times, without fail. Conveyances and motives, both conventional and bizarre, have been provided…” (Vonnegut, p.1). Initially I interpreted this in the sense that Jonah registered a sense of resignation, that he recognized the parallel frameworks of both life and literature but fed up with the struggle against it. This later found support in Jonah’s description of how Bokononism, a made-up religion founded on the island of San Lorenzo, had applied to his life during his days as a Christian (the vindit of Mr. Krebbs, section 34-6). Also,on page 2, Jonah mentioned karass and kan-kan, two of the many Bokononist terms, to give us a sense of what such high calling can be perceived. The Day the World Ended, Jonah’s kan-kan, was never finished. A barely-finished instrument (possibly due to the fact that this is meant to be a factual but Christan book) brought our narrator into a team clueless of its purpose assigned by God ((Vonnegut, p. 2). Who, just who, is this God? Is he the same God as in the Bible?. Vonnegut, through the voice of Jonah, wants us to think so. First, in section 3, from the “parable on the folly of pretending to discover”, we know Bokonon was a carpenter. Jesus was also a carpenter. Later we would know Bokonon used to be a christened Lionel B. Johnson educated also in Episcopalian, the Christian sect mentioned in section 3. This begs the first comparison between Bokonon and Jesus. The contrast between Books of Bokonon and the Book of Common Prayers (dominantly used in Episcopalian sect) cemented this comparison/ contrast. Yes the fact that there are multiple Books hint at something rather interesting about Bokonon too (which ties nicely with the paradox of a banned religion whose recent books, related by Jonah to the readers, still keep up with contemporary events. See, for instance, the Bokonon poem about Mona, p.140).
Just one small speculative argument and already it eats up a blog post. But, as granfalloons of this college level class, the best way to learn is to fail, not to be warned (like the masses of nations trying to conquer San Lorenzo, section 57). Yet, I find myself struggling to fight against the long-conditioned urge to blow this blog post way out of proportion with textual speculations and extrapolations. And the cold doesn’t help either.
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