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| Photo Credit: Carl Collins http://www.flickr.com/photos/carlcollins/448906380/lightbox/ |
The game is silly and pointless, but worldwide, children still go through the its same old motions every day. Here's how you play it: You weave string together to create a something that resembles a cradle. You show this to a friend, who moves the string around a bit, and together you make a design. You meander through more designs before you return to the first one and do it over and over again. As you go through the motions of the game, it becomes clear that there is no way to win or lose; there is no score and no referee. Nobody cares but you.
All of the game unravels when a careless mistake is made; someone grabs the wrong string or forgets to hold it tight. The elaborate structures you have built reveal themselves to be nothing but lost, pointless constructions, and you are left with nothing but a simple, endless loop. The only purpose of the designs is to distract from the fact that all we have is a useless circle.
Life is silly and pointless, but worldwide, people still go through its same old motions every day. Here's how you play it: You weave ideas together to create a something that resembles a purpose. You show this to a friend, who moves the ideas around a bit, and together you make a belief. You meander through more beliefs before you return to the first one and do it over and over again. As you go through the motions of life, it becomes clear that there is no way to win or lose; there is no score and no referee. Nobody cares but you.
All of life unravels when a careless mistake is made; someone grabs the wrong idea or forgets to hold it tight. The elaborate structures you have built reveal themselves to be nothing but lost, pointless constructions, and you are left with nothing but a simple, endless loop. The only purpose of the beliefs is to distract from the fact that all we have is a useless circle.
That was a very nihilistic metaphor to make, and I don't think the purpose of Cat's Cradle as a book is to say that life is meaningless. However, the game of Cat's Cradle, which represents nihilism, is held in dynamic tension with the idea of hope. These opposing motifs, along with many others, are part of the web of paradoxes that make up the world of Cat's Cradle.
First of all, I love the picture that you posted. I also think that it's interesting that you drew attention to the fact that life is not meaningless, and yet Vonnegut is comparing it to a Cat's Cradle. I found myself perplexed by this. Is Vonnegut saying that life is meaningless, or his he saying that we fabricate useless meanings instead of searching for a real one?
ReplyDeleteI agree completely with your analysis of the metaphor of Cat’s Cradle. However, I actually do think it can be argued that Vonnegut is commenting on his belief in the meaninglessness of life through the novel. His vessels for this commentary are the Bokononists – spinning their own ‘cat’s cradles’ through the foma that keep them happy. The foma are lies, yet Bokononists believe that everything that happens in their life is meant to happen, that everything is connected – in this, they find meaning in madness. However, pull apart the strings of foma that they tie together and you end up with an empty circle: the people of San Lorenzo are starving, living miserably, on the verge of death. Bokononists play cat’s cradle when connecting and assigning meaning to the events in their lives, but that ‘game’ is merely a coping mechanism, a distraction from the chaos and essential worthlessness of the world around them.
ReplyDeleteYou could say the game falls apart when you or your partner makes the wrong move, or you could say you simply find yourself in a trickier situation. A situation that you must acknowledge, respond to, and in turn, find a way back to the rhythm of life, the rhythm of the game. I guess it's more of a question of optimism versus pessimism. From an optimist's point of view, there is no "wrong" move in the game, merely an "unusual" one. When we make one of these "unusual" moves, we are simply straying from the norm, straying from the crowd. What's the harm in that? Must we always follow those in front of us?
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