Sumários

Please, y'all: will you finish reading the book so that class participation can become more...participative? (For those of you who don't know what 'y'all' is, it's the 2nd person plural pronoun used in the Souther United States, the equivalent of 'vós' or 'vossasmercês').

Here were some of the themes explored in class today:

The End of the World

in the beginning of the novel, John/Jonah is writing a book entitled "The Day the World Ended", a book about the day the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima from the point-of-view of Dr. Felix Hoenikker (one of the fathers of the atom bomb) and from those of his children;
we discover that shortly before the bombing of Hiroshima, a man in prison sends his manuscript for a novel about the end of the world to Dr. Felix Hoenikker for advice and feedback, a novel that Felix never reads - instead he uses the string that was wrapped around the manuscript to play cat's cradle with it on the day of the bombing, the first game anyone has ever seen him play;John/Jonah ends up not writing about to write the book "Cat's Cradle" instead, where the world actually ends at the end of it.

both John's/Jonah's abandoned book and the prisoner's ignored book (and, of course, Cat's Cradle itself) represent A WARNING to society: it can really happen if we're not careful.

Science

Felix Hoenikker and Asa Breed - both obsessed with 'knowledge' and with the 'truth' of science, as opposed to the 'nonsense' of religion, supersitition, etc.
Felix particularly has no interest in emotions (such as love) - as he proves from his profound indifference for his wife and children.
in his Nobel prize acceptance speech he says, "Ladies and Gentlemen, I stand before you now because I never stopped dawdling like an eight-year-old on a spring morning on his way to school. Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn. I am a very happy man. Thank you."

it is in this speech that Felix himself admits that he is just a child.

Love

Emily, the most beautiful woman in the county with whom all the men fel in love, is the true symbol of love in the Hoenikker family

she raised her two older children and took care of her husband as though he were a child,
she died from Felix's selfishness as she had to pick up the car he abandoned in the middle of a traffic jam and had an accident on the way home that badly affected her womb which led to her death upon Newt's birth;

Mona, the most beautiful woman in San Lorenzo with whom all the men fall in love - she is, in a way, Emily's replacement. Interestingly, Frank (the only child that Felix really fathered, supposedly and the only one who is like his father in terms of temperment and selfishness), is the only man to reject Mona and hands her over to John/Jonah for him to marry and hands over San Lorenzo for him to govern.

However, she refuses to marry John/Jonah if he should insist that she love him and only him - Mona loves EVERYONE and will not be celibate.
Mona is a total bokononist - science is not her thing - she is a MUSICIAN like EMILY.

Angela and Newt:

Angela and Newt, who are most likely not Felix's children but rather Asa Breed's, desperately need love and trade their pieces of ice-9 for love:

Angela:

substituted Emily and became the mother of her two younger brothers and her father;
places an instrument like her mother, in private, in her bedroom;
gives her piece of ice-9 to her 'out-of-the-blue' husband who happens to own or work for an American weapons manufacturing company;

Newt the dwarf, whose birth partly killed his mother, falls in love with Zinka, a Ukrainian dancer who turns out to be a Russian spy who steals Newt's ice-9 to give it to the Russians.

Politics

the nuclear bomb contributed to the ending of the 2nd World War when it went off in Hiroshima;
it started the Cold War;
people were terrified of what the Russians and the Americans could do to each other and the world with their nuclear programs.

Truth

John/Jonah the journalist (who starts off being a nihilist before becoming a bokononist)
Bokonon the liar (who tries to create a Utopia in San Lorenzo)

this theme and the theme of RELIGION and ART to be continued next class.

Read the book, people. Read the book.