We Bokononists believe that humanity is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a karass by Bokonon, and the instrument, the kan-kan, that brought me into my own particular karass was the book I never finished, the book to be called The Day the World Ended.

Kurt Vonnegut in Cat’s Cradle, 5

The thirteen books chosen for our Siblings’ Book Club this year have mostly been wonderful. Of the 8 I’ve completed so far, I’ve truly enjoyed 6 of them. I’m not certain I’ll be able to finish the other 5 before years’ end, but I’m trying. Cat’s Cradle was one I hated.

My Brief History with Kurt Vonnegut

I’ve read a number of Kurt Vonnegut novels in the past—many in college that I never reviewed—and am fully aware that his books tend to be odd pieces of satire often with a Sci-fi flair. I’ve generally appreciated his humor and writing style of irony and creative repetition.

Hocus Pocus was an early favorite of mine, and Player Piano educated me. Breakfast of Champions was depressing, while Mother Night provided a unique insight into Vonnegut’s own wartime experiences. Slaughterhouse Five deserves its place as a classic of American literature, but Cat’s Cradle … man, I just couldn’t get into it!

The Story in Brief

The plot of Cat’s Cradle follows Jonah, who’s writing a book (that he never finishes, as the early quote above relates) about what people were doing on the day the Atomic Bombs were dropped in Japan. Specifically, he follows the children of one creator of the bomb, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, and their use (and misuse) of his created substance, “Ice Nine.”

The Bombs and the Message

We don’t think about the A-bombs too often anymore, but we need to remember that that day in history was real, and it was terrible. The bombs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki constitute the most twisted use of “the ends justify the means” barbary in the history of warfare. It’s hard to fathom how we actually let it happen.

Vonnegut agrees, of course, so this book is yet another critique of America’s societal ills as he saw them. Humanity was slowly killing itself, so it wasn’t unfathomable to him that we’d someday obliterate ourselves entirely.

But Vonnegut goes further in this book than merely speaking against war and the bombs and human stupidity—his book is entirely anti-faith, anti-meaning-for-anything-in-life, and thus (once again) anti-God. If Breakfast of Champions was depressing, then this book is downright gut-wrenching.

The Bokonon religion was a well-known fabrication in this setting, yet Jonah bought into it. He blindly followed “the bittersweet lies” of its teachings and willfully succumbed to the absurdities of living as a pawn among strangers to be moved willy-nilly according to “God’s will.”

Why I Hated This Book

We all know that Kurt Vonnegut was never a Christian. He was instead an atheist and humanist who became the Honorary President of the American Humanist Association after Isaac Asimov’s death in 1992. And while Asimov rarely wrote scathingly against religion or God in his fiction, Vonnegut did—and often. Couched in humor and absurdism, Vonnegut’s fiction almost always attacks human attempts at organization—especially religion—and frequently portrays the religious as misguided nuts bent on self-destruction.

Sure, Vonnegut takes aim at all organized religions and not Christianity alone, but given his cultural context, we can guess that “the church” was very much in his sights. And while it can be healthy to read the other team’s playbook once in a while, I honestly don’t need this crap in my life right now. Vonnegut—and anti-religion fiction in general—has its audience, and I’m not it.

Conclusion

Will I ever read Kurt Vonnegut again? Yeah, probably. My interests fluctuate often, and I’ll likely find myself again hankering for another humorous take on the foibles of humanity. Next time, however, I’ll have to do more research first to find one I can mostly agree with—and I’m sure he’s written a few more of those.

People certainly can be stupid and organizations can be self-destructive. Vonnegut—the “Christ-loving agnostic” (as he called himself in his autobiography, Palm Sunday) can teach even a Christian like me, but no matter what’s written or trashed or read or ignored, I know that through it all, God alone will ultimately get the glory:

5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus, 6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God, 7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men. 8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross. 9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name, 10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth, 11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father. (Philippians 2:5-11, NKJV)

©2025 E.T.

Read More from Kurt Vonnegut:

• Player Piano (1952)
• Mother Night (1961)
• Cat’s Cradle (1963)
• Breakfast of Champions (1973)
• Slaughterhouse-Five (2020, with Ryan North and Albert Monteys)