1108 Vonnegut, Kurt
his own responsibility as a recorder of history; to
the responsibility of politicians and religious leaders
who establish legal and moral guidelines to control
human behavior; to the responsibility of scientists
who introduce new technologies, such as the dev-
astating ice-nine, a compound that freezes water
instantaneously. It is around this substance that the
various characters’ actions collide. Their successes
and failures, mishaps and misunderstandings, duties
and desires converge with disastrous results: the
virtual annihilation of the planet. Yet in recount-
ing this bleak history, Jonah offers hope as well by
exposing the dual nature of the burdensome gift of
responsibility.
Questions about the nature and scope of respon-
sibility surface as Jonah investigates his initial
subject, the deceased Dr. Felix Hoenikker, one of
the so-called fathers of the atom bomb and creator
of ice-nine. While visiting Ilium, New York, where
Hoenikker conducted research in the laboratories
of the General Forge and Foundry Company, Jonah
begins to discover the myriad paths that have been
opened and closed by Hoenikker’s work. Although
Hoenikker meets his obligations to his employers,
producing “new knowledge,” he fails his responsibil-
ity to humanity, represented on a smaller scale by
his benign neglect of his family. Because Hoenik-
ker’s commitment to research supersedes his other
responsibilities, his three children—Frank, Angela,
and Newt—bereft of their mother, who died in a
car accident, become responsible for one another’s
care. Hoenikker’s choices thus influence the choices
of his children, who take their familial responsi-
bilities seriously, genuinely caring for each other
and their father’s legacy. Yet they, too, suffer from
shortsightedness, mishandling their control of their
father’s lethal creation by giving preference to their
personal needs and wants, as each acquires some-
thing in exchange for providing access to ice-nine.
Frank becomes the minister of science and progress
in the Republic of San Lorenzo, a poor island ruled
by the dictator Miguel “Papa” Monzano; the homely
Angela marries the magnetic Harrison C. Conners,
former laboratory assistant to her father and cur-
rent president of Fabri-Tek, a secretive company
with lucrative government contracts; and Newt has
a short-lived tryst with Zinka, a Ukrainian midget
and dancer who turns out to be a Russian spy. As
Jonah’s investigation unfolds, so, too, does the intri-
cate web of choice and its consequences, leading him
to recognize that free will carries a significant price.
Jonah’s awakening is most notably influenced
by Bokonon, a self-styled prophet and outlaw of
San Lorenzo, whose tract The Books of Bokonon pro-
vides a framework through which Jonah comes to
understand the workings of the universe. Bokonon’s
philosophies are often paradoxical; he even declares
that his own writings are nothing but foma—lies.
Such contradictions are at the root of human exis-
tence and are reflected not only in the content but
also the structure of Jonah’s narrative. Jonah’s history
is colored by hindsight, as his conversion to Boko-
nonism grows out of his research, a process that is
imbedded in his story about the end of the world.
Defining the Bokononist concept of the karass,
Jonah says, “We Bokononists believe that humanity
is organized into teams, teams that do God’s Will
without ever discovering what they are doing,” yet
by the time he is recording this history, Jonah has
become aware of his own role in the work of his
team and the significance of his responsibility as a
writer. When the San Lorenzan hotelier and author
Philip Castle suggests that artists should refuse to
create new works “until mankind finally comes to its
senses,” Jonah says, “No, I don’t think my conscience
would let me support a strike like that. When a
man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred
obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and
comfort at top speed.” Consequently, Jonah commits
himself to “examine all strong hints as to what on
Earth we, collectively, have been up to,” even while
accepting that he will never truly comprehend “what
God is Doing.”
The result of such commitment is one of the
most striking achievements of Vonnegut’s novel.
The fictional narrator blends with the real-life
author. Weaving elements of actual history with
a fantastically imagined one, Vonnegut and his
creation work together to enact a critical tenet of
Bokononism: “ ‘Write it all down,’ Bokonon tells us.
He is really telling us, of course, how futile it is to
write or read histories. ‘Without accurate records
of the past, how can men and women be expected
to avoid making serious mistakes in the future?’ he