1106 Vonnegut, Kurt
degraded time and again by rape, prostitution and
torture. Everyone in the story is exposed to, and
affected by, violence and cruelty—to such an
extent that Candide provides a list of man’s vices
in chapter 21 and kills several people before the
end. As Cacambo remarks in chapter 16, “natural
law teaches us to kill our neighbor.” By describing
universal suffering, Voltaire implies that civilization
is a farce. Humans are depicted as no better than
animals, pursuing their own interests at the expense
of the safety, well-being, and happiness of others.
Suffering is not always caused by physical pain
in Candide; mental pain also plays an important role.
Thinking, in and of itself, is a cause of anguish and
torment, and those who are never exposed to physi-
cal violence also suffer. For instance, the wealthy
Venetian, Pococurante, has all that a man of means
could desire—riches, learning, and culture—but he
is not happy. Instead, he suffers from the intense
boredom born of needing nothing—he is “disgusted
with everything he possesses.” In the case of Pan-
gloss, on the other hand, it is clear that at least some
suffering could have been avoided had he spent less
time discoursing and more time acknowledging the
reality of the world around him. This is particularly
true in chapter 5, when an injured Candide loses
consciousness while Pangloss philosophizes instead
of caring for him.
That misery is universal is proved in chapter 9, in
which a “throng” of people respond to Candide’s call
to find the person who is “most discontented with
his lot for the best reasons.” However, the purpose of
the suffering in this story becomes clear in the Old
Woman’s tale, for it is she who challenges Candide
and Cunégonde to find a single person “who has
not often cursed his life” (34) or thought himself the
“unhappiest of men.” While the Old Woman has
withstood a great deal of suffering, she does not give
in to despair. Instead, she teaches Candide resilience
and endurance: Pain will always exist, but its true
destructiveness lies in its ability to destroy morale. For
this reason, the more Candide is exposed to misery,
the less inclined he is to try to explain its existence.
On the contrary, he accepts its reality and attempts
to build his own happiness in spite of the natural,
human, and philosophical evils that he encounters.
Katherine Ashley
voNNEGuT, kurT Cat’s Cradle
(1963)
In his comic science-fiction morality tale Cat’s
Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) employs a self-
reflexive style as the narrator, Jonah, tells a story
about a book he had planned to write on the drop-
ping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. In the
first chapter, “The Day the World Ended,” Jonah
explains that the book, which was to be called The
Day the World Ended, was never finished; by the final
chapter, “The End,” the reader discovers that Jonah
has, in fact, written a story about the end of the
world, albeit not the one he had imagined.
The novel charts Jonah’s winding path from
Ilium, New York, where he begins his investiga-
tion into the life and work of one of the so-called
fathers of the atom bomb, Dr. Felix Hoenikker, to
the island of San Lorenzo, a banana republic run
by the dictator Miguel “Papa” Monzano. Along the
way, Jonah encounters a cast of outlandish charac-
ters whose interlacing choices all contribute to an
increasingly absurd series of events, culminating
in Jonah becoming the ruler of San Lorenzo upon
Monzano’s death. Jonah’s reign is cut short, how-
ever, as ice-nine, a devastating substance created by
Hoenikker, is accidentally unleashed on the world
with cataclysmic results.
At its heart a cautionary tale, Cat’s Cradle is
deceptively complex, for though Vonnegut often
pushes his satire into the realm of slapstick, the
philosophical questions that emerge as tenets of
Bokononism, the renegade San Lorenzan religion
to which Jonah and others adhere, prompt the reader
to reflect on human folly.
Margaret SavilonisIndIvIduaL and SocIety in Cat’s Cradle
As Jonah, the narrator of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel
Cat’s Cradle, pursues his research on Dr. Felix Hoe-
nikker, one of the “fathers” of the atomic bomb, he
encounters a cast of characters whose individual
actions intersect in ways that have far-reaching
consequences. Planning to write a tale that empha-
sizes “the human rather than the technical side of the
bomb,” Jonah ends up crafting a story about Hoe-
nikker’s even more devastating creation, ice-nine.
Casting his recollection of the events that lead to