In the very beginning of Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, the narrator quotes the first sentence in The Books of Bokonon, stating "All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies." It was this first mention of the idea of lies that has colored my reading of the novel so far. The idea that something can be both true and a lie is something that has interested me since reading Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. Similar to O'Brien, Vonnegut offers examples of statements that, though the may not be factually correct, ring truer than statements that in fact are factually correct. The first example that I see of this in Cat's Cradle is on page twenty five, where the two people the narrator are drinking with discuss the "basic secret of life" as discovered by science. "'Protein,' the bartender declared. 'They found out something about protein.'" While protein might technically and factually be the basic secret to life, it offers less value or "truth", than some of the things stated by Bokonon, which can be seen as lies.
I'm not entirely sure where Vonnegut himself stands with respect to science as on display in this book While he did major in a science (Chemistry), the destructive consequences of scientific advancement can be seen throughout the book, with the use of the atomic bombs and the use of ice-nine. Though does the use of these weapons actually reflect any intrinsic destructiveness within science, or rather does it reveal the destructive nature of humanity that most of us would rather lie about and blame on science instead?
My initial thoughts were actually not about Vonnegut's view of science, but religion. He's an atheist, so I thought that maybe he wrote about Bokononism in a way that seems believable yet a bit ridiculous, as if to say something about religion today. The practices that the people of Bokononism perform are really not all that different from religions today; they just seem strange because we haven't heard of them before.
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