In Cat's Cradle, mud is both man's downfall and its origin. Looking back, it's easy to pinpoint the initial idea that ultimately ended the world: "The absence of mud. No more mud" (Vonnegut 43). The marines asked for a way to turn mud solid, and Hoenikker's mind went off like a shot. This short-sighted request from a general is what sparked Hoenikker's imagination and led to the creation of ice-nine.
When I first read that passage, I thought the "stinking miasma and ooze" (47) that the general complained of would be mentioned only once. I figured it was a one-time symbol of man's carelessness, a tongue-in-cheek comment about how any seemingly inconsequential thing can mean the end of the world. But Bokonon incorporates mud into the fundamental mythology of his religion. Bokononism has no Adam and Eve. Instead, "God said, 'Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done'" (265). We are the mud. By destroying the mud, ice-nine destroys humanity.
In class, we talked about how a cat's cradle represents the dynamic tension between science and religion, with each half needed to uphold the other. Mud is yet another way in which Vonnegut weaves this idea into the book. It creates a closed loop: the world began in mud and ended because of its absence. Bokononism's origin story fits neatly into place beside science's apocalypse. And so, in typical Vonnegut fashion, life on planet Earth comes to a screeching halt with perfect poetic justice.
Lindsey, I am so glad that you brought this up since I definitely missed this connection upon first read but it is a great point! When I first read about Hoenniker's creation of ice-nine I thought that the vendetta against mud seemed bizarre--much like most the rest of Vonnegut's novel, so I didn't question it. So after thinking about Bokonon's genesis story about people descending from mud, it follows logically that the "mud" the military general is so fed up with is actually other human beings. In war, humans kill other humans, often going to whatever extremes are necessary to accomplish their task. An example of this is the atomic bomb, the same one that Dr. Hoenikker worked on. Isn't it interesting then that Dr. Hoenikker created the two weapons that ended the world twice? Jonah's novel entitled The Day The World Ended was supposed to be about how the atomic bomb effectively ended the world, but the novel that Jonah ended up narrating (aka Cat's Cradle) describes the actual end of the world due to ice-nine. What both of these cases have in common is that the weapons that destroyed the world were both created with war in mind. So while science is what created these weapons, war was what called for their creation in the first place. Thus war takes on a bigger role in the novel than I had originally thought: it is the fighting amongst people that ultimately causes the world to end. While much of Vonnegut's novel discusses the tension between religion and science, he also brings up the idea that this tension is at least partially caused by expansive war and the tendency for a muddy puddle to just get bigger and bigger.
ReplyDeleteI also see mud as another sort of “cat’s cradle”. In order to form things out of mud, one needs tension. In fact, most mud can’t retain shape unless it’s in someone’s hands.
ReplyDeleteThe mud here symbolizes the harmless untruths, the abstracts, the ideas that may never become solid. When Hoenicker tries to turn mud solid, to solidify abstract ideas, or “lies”, Hoenicker accidentally ends up destroying the world. In this way, it is impossible to distinguish or hold reality, and when we try, it oozes from our fingers like mud.