Hey everyone,
So we talked today a little bit about Cat’s Cradle and certain implications of science in the novel. I explained the imagery of the albatross, from Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, but there are many more images of warning that are evident in the novel. One thing that I just noticed while glancing through the novel was that in the pivotal apocalyptic chapter, “The grand Ah-Whoom” on pg. 216, the narrator states, “I was recalled from this dream by the cry of a darting bird above me. It seemed to be asking me what had happened. “Poo-phweet?”.
Now I know some of you will think I am just reading into this too much (cough…Juval), but I think Kurt put this imagery of a bird right at the moment the earth ends for a very specific reason. In that book I like to quote from, “Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut”, he mentions that he thinks writers should be like canaries in the coal mine. For those who don’t know, in coal mines during the early industrial revolution, miners would send canaries into mines and if there was a poisonous gas leak, the canaries would start chirping and warn the miners not to go down. So should writers be to society as a whole…
Anyways, I think it is important that Vonnegut includes the bird at this point in the story. It is also important that the narrator is also a writer, and that he is writing all of this down after the ice-nine has turned the world topsy turvy. In this case, Jonah sees it as a responsibility to write down his experiences so that it can be a warning for anyone who finds it. Paradoxically, it seems as though there is no hope for the human race at this point in the novel. But, the fact that the writer endeavours to write anyways, even though his words may not make any difference, is important in looking at Vonnegut’s approach to writing a novel so heavily burdened with questions that seemingly do not have answers.
If anyone has anything they would like to add of this, or wants to take this idea in a different direction….post away!
Tony
It’s not that important, but miners would actually take canaries in cages into the mine. Since the canaries breath at such a higher rate and are much smaller than humans, they would die much quicker. If the miners stopped hearing the canaries singing or saw a dead canary, then they would know that there was poison gas. There were no trained, gas-sniffing canaries (that would be cool though-poor little canaries).
I’m not sure if this particular instance of a bird in the novel has anything to do with author’s as canaries in coal mines, but it does possibly have an environmental meaning. If man continues to pursue science without a moral barometer, then (according to Vonnegut) we are going to destroy everything (the bird is a symbol of all that is beautiful and free). It’s not a coincidence that the creator of ice-nine was also the creator of the atom bomb. I think the fact that at the end of the book nobody has any sex drive says something as well-if we continue this blind pursuit, we are going to make a world so loathsome that we will not even want to fulfill our most basic desire/needs. Either way, it seems like the canaries lose…
I do think it is possible to find meaning in every part of the book, whether it was intended or not. When speaking of gender we mentioned that the women were being treated a certain way and that it meant something. The truth of it was that in most offices in America when an executive wanted something typed up he would tape record and then send it to the typists, usually kept in a secluded place because the work was not creative at all. It just happened to be that this job was seen as a job like a secretary and women were dominating the field. A man would talk about type writers saying, “don’t be scared off by the technology, the men who made this made it simple enough for a woman to use”. I don’t know how aware Vonnegut was of the inconsistencies of how women were treated then or if he was simply just writing things as they were without giving it much thought. Also, the Christmas caroling done by the typists was not unique to the research facility either. That too was common for executive offices in the 20th century.
I wanted to add to Juval commentson the gender role issues brought up by Vonnegut’s narrative. It is certainly possible ot find any kind of meaning, importance and significance to passages in novels, but I strongly believe that Vonnegut was very aware of his work, and in the most intentional sense..
The women, I think, are meant to show a civilian day to day perspective on life during the time period in which Cat’s Cradle takes place. The atomic bomb caused chaos, and global fear. Yet, in the caroling passage we see that “life goes on” or that on the small macro societal level, science and war, and the bomb didn’t really have any effect.