Cat's Cradle

Miss Faust recalls Dr. Hoenikker challenging her to say something “absolutely true.” When she responded that “God is love,” Dr. Hoenikker asked, “What is God? What is love?” (55).

John visits Dr. Hoenikker’s room, which is preserved as he left it. The room is filled with cheap toys, lab equipment, and unanswered mail. A framed photograph on his desk features a war memorial, which Dr. Hoenikker selected because of the unusual way the cannonballs were stacked.

To Miss Faust’s annoyance, they end up in Elevator 5, where an outspoken Black operator makes jokes about the research facility, such as asking what was lost to make the researchers feel the need to re-search, or “look again” (59).

John visits the cemetery where Mr. and Mrs. Hoenikker are buried, hoping to take a picture for his book.

John realizes that the Hoenikker plot’s largest monument, which features tributes from Angela, Frank, and Newt, is for Emily Hoenikker while a smaller, plainer monument marks Dr. Hoenikker’s grave.

At his cab driver’s request, John stops by the tombstone store, which is run by Dr. Breed’s brother Marvin. John takes a liking to a stone angel carved by Marvin’s great-grandfather, but Marvin says it is not for sale.

Marvin says that the monument at Emily’s grave was erected at her children’s request more than a year after her death, and they visit it frequently.

Marvin, who went to high school with Emily, says that she had many admirers, including him and his brother. She chose to marry Dr. Hoenikker for his intelligence and innocent disposition, but he never really loved or understood her.

Marvin talks about the Hoenikker children. As a youth, Frank worked at a hobby shop making models. He left Ilium during Dr. Hoenikker’s funeral and moved to Florida, where he got mixed up with a criminal group that smuggles stolen cars to Cuba. After splitting up with the Ukrainian dancer, Newt moved to Indianapolis to live with Angela, herself a skilled clarinetist who dropped out of high school to take on domestic duties after Emily’s death.

The cab driver tries to buy the stone angel, but Marvin explains that it was made by his great-grandfather for a German immigrant whose wife died. Yet he failed to pay for it after he was robbed during its construction; by coincidence, the name on the angel is John’s last name. He considers the coincidence as an early nudge toward Bokononism.

John visits Jack’s Hobby Shop, where Frank used to work. Jack, whose wife recently left him, describes Frank as a “genius” who spent all his free time building models. John examines a model town built by Frank.

While he travels, John lets a nihilistic poet named Sherman Krebbs stay in his apartment. He returns home to find his apartment wrecked, his cat dead, and poetry written on the walls and floor. John identifies Krebbs as a wrang-wrang in Bokononist belief, or someone who convinces a person not to go down a certain path based on their own bad example. From this point on, John avoids nihilism.

One day, John reads in the newspaper that Frank, now 26 years old, is a military general and minister of science in the Republic of San Lorenzo, a Caribbean Island nation ruled by elderly dictator Miguel “Papa” Monzano. John is drawn to a photo of Mona Monzano, Papa Monzano’s adopted daughter.

John learns that San Lorenzo has about half a million people. Papa Monzano hired Frank to create a “San Lorenzo Master Plan” of reform under the assumption that he inherited Dr. Hoenikker’s intelligence.

John reads Frank’s account of how he ended up on San Lorenzo. After leaving Cuba on a boat, Frank got lost and ended up in San Lorenzo, where he was jailed until Papa Monzano learned he was Dr. Hoenikker’s son and offered him a job.

John is assigned to write a magazine article about millionaire Julian Castle. Up until he was about 40, Julian lived a selfish life, but for the last 20 years, he devoted himself to running a free hospital called the House of Hope and Mercy in San Lorenzo. As John prepares to leave, he imagines falling in love with Mona.

On the flight to San Lorenzo, John meets Horlick Minton, the newly appointed US ambassador to San Lorenzo, and his wife Claire. Horlick and Claire are so close that John decides they belong to their own, two-person karass, known as a duprass. John compliments the Mintons, but they don’t seem impressed.

In a bar at the back of the plane, John meets H. Lowe Crosby, an American businessman, and his wife Hazel. Lowe explains that he intends to close his bike factory in Chicago due to unionization and taxation, and then open a new plant in San Lorenzo where, as he puts it, “the people […] are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!” (89).

When Hazel learns that John is, like her, a Hoosier (a person from Indiana), she lists famous Hoosiers and insists that he call her “Mom.” John explains that Hoosiers are, like nations, an example of a granfalloon, or a false and meaningless karass.

Lowe shares his admiration for San Lorenzo’s penal system. Under this system, criminals are sentenced to death by “the hook,” a gruesome punishment that involves piercing and then hanging them from a large hook. Hazel recalls seeing a wax representation of someone dying by the hook in a museum in London.

The Crosbys tell John that the Mintons are Communist sympathizers. When John returns to his seat, the Mintons deny the charge and explain that their “pessimism” and frustrations at Americans’ short-sightedness fueled rumors that they were Communist sympathizers.

Claire explains that a letter she wrote to the New York Times during McCarthyism led to Horlick being fired from the State Department. In the letter, Claire argued that US foreign policy “should recognize hate rather than imagine love” (98). She says that it is normal for people to hate each other.

John asks the Mintons about Frank. They explain that the US government no longer regards him as a fugitive since he took up his post in San Lorenzo. They show him a semi-scholarly book about San Lorenzo written by Philip Castle, Julian’s son who runs a hotel in San Lorenzo. John stumbles across a quotation from Bokonon, paraphrasing a Biblical saying: “Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s really going on” (101).

John continues to read the book as the plane makes a brief stop in Puerto Rico, where Newt and Angela get on board, though John doesn’t recognize them. He reads about Bokonon’s belief in “Dynamic Tension,” the concept that strong societies require good and evil to co-exist. A calypso poem by Bokonon suggests that Papa Monzano’s evil makes Bokonon look good.