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After our class discussion on the all-consuming game(s) of cat's cradle being played in Cat's Cradle, I began to run through the various scenes Vonnegut places the reader in to determine whether this conceit was as deeply embedded in the novel as Professor Schwartz made it out to be. Eventually, Dr. Asa Breed's "theoretical" description of ice-nine came up, and with it, a thought.

Though we'll never know the exact molecular structure of Felix Hoenikker brand ice-nine (as opposed to real life Ice IX), I would like to think that it resembles a latticework of cat's cradles, each intersecting and mingling with frigid conviction, thumbing their noses at You-Know-Who (Vonnegut, 287). This is probably a stretch, seeing as Dr. Hoenikker is suggested to have perhaps based the structure of ice-nine on cannonballs "stacked on different courthouse lawns" (Vonnegut, 57). However, that might also be a stretch, so for the time being, I'm going to stick with my cat's cradle theory, mainly due to the fact that, as we have discussed, Vonnegut extensively utilizes metatexual elements to get his points across.

Further metatextuality presents itself if one assumes that the very substance that froze the world's game of cat's cradle was comprised of wee little cat's cradles. This fits in with Vonnegut's usage of the cat's cradle as a symbol of the cyclical nature of things, and the futility of trying to break away from the dynamic tension of the cat's cradle. If life, in all its vastness, can be represented by a simple children's game, a life-ending substance should be represented by it too, especially when one considers that said substance was distributed, carried, and finally deposited in the maw of the ocean by one vessel alone: human stupidity (Vonnegut, 287).