The Role Ofreligion And Morality In Cats Cradle Essays -

The Role Ofreligion And Morality In Cat's Cradle As an author, Kurt Vonnegut has received just about every kind of praise an author can receive: his works held the same sway over American philosophy as did those of Jack Kerouac or J.R.R. Tolkein; his writing has received acclaim from academics and the masses alike; and three of his books have been made into feature films. Society has permanently and noticeably been altered by his writing. Through accessible language and easily-understood themes, Vonnegut has created works subtle, engrossing, and familiar. His main method for doing this is by exploiting a theme with which everyone is familiar and about which everyone has his own opinion: religion. Not many people are more qualified to explore this theme than Vonnegut. He was born in 1922 on Armistice Day (November 11), a holiday celebrating peace, in Indianapolis. His family was moderately wealthy until the onset of the Great Depression, when they lost everything. In 1944, Vonnegut's mother committed suicide by overdosing on sleeping pills. Soon afterwards, he joined the army and fought in the Second World War. Vonnegut was captured as a POW and kept prisoner in Dresden. Soon after his capture, Dresden, an entirely civilian town, was bombed heavily. Vonnegut survived the bombing, came home, and became a writer. His first book, Player Piano, received very little notice at the time it was written, 1952. When he published Sirens of Titan in 1959, it also was largely ignored. In 1969, Vonnegut published Slaughterhouse Five, which was an immediate commercial and academic success. Slaughterhouse Five's success brought attention to his other works, and though Vonnegut was not as popu lar after the ?60's, he continued to publish successful books (http://www.duke.edu/~crh4/vonnegut/). Vonnegut's works have been classified as ?science fiction?, but that hardly does them justice. His works are significantly influenced by that genre, but contain strikingly relevant commentaries about contemporary American society which set him apart from other science-fiction writers. His use of science fiction draws a humorous contrast between the all-important significance of the nature of the universe and of reality, and the insignificance of human life and society. All of his works emphasize the enormous forces acting on his characters, not the least of which is fate. As his writing progressed and matured, this stylistic nuance became more and more evident. In his book Slaughterhouse Five, Vonnegut describes his own style by means of Tralfamadorians, an alien race for whom time is nonexistent, and whose literature reflects this: Each clump of symbols is a brief, urgent message describing a situation, a scene. We Tralfamadorians read them all at once, not one after the oth- er. There isn't any particular relationship between all the messages ex- cept that the author has chosen them carefully, so that, when seen all at once, they produce an image of life that is beautiful and surprising and deep. There is no beginning, no middle, no end, no suspense, no moral, no causes, no effects. What we love in our books are the depths of many marvelous moments seen all at one time (88). Indeed, Vonnegut has dismissed temporal continuity in his writing, and has thus eliminated suspense. Characters are often aware of their own inevitable destiny, as in The Sirens of Titan, and are helpless to stop it from coming to pass. Vonnegut makes it clear that modern society is much like this - people can see where they're headed, but are too powerless or apathetic to prevent it. In his book Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut mocks people's mindless, apathetic acceptance of their fates by portraying a situation in which unimaginably powerful forces toss around people desperate to escape them. He presents ?civilization's attempt to commit suicide (Hocus Pocus, 72)?, the atomic bomb dropped at Hiroshima, and ends the book with all of the water on earth freezing as the result of a substance called ?ice-nine?, and thus civilization successfully committing suicide. Ironically, the man who created the atomic bomb also created ice-nine, a man not diabolically evil, but merely absent-minded. In this, Vonnegut portrays not only the amazing influence the forces of the universe have on us, but also the influence a select few of us have on the forces of the universe. In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut describes an amazingly