“Nothing in this book is true”:

on Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle

Ádám T. Bogár (Kurt Vonnegut Society)

In the first place, this is very much like Vonnegut.

Readers tend to consider “Call me Jonah” the first sentence of Kurt Vonnegut’s 1963
novel Cat’s Cradle, and parallels are of course often drawn between this phrase and the “Call
me Ishmael” of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (see e.g. Thomas [2006] and Wharton [2003]).
However, due to the authorial and narrative structure of the novel, it is really the inscription
“Nothing in this book is true” (Vonnegut 1963: vii) that acts as the actual first line of the text.
This inscription is obviously an invasive interference of the author with the text, and
as such, is part of the novel (not only of the book), regardless of the fact that it can be found in
the middle of the front matter.1 As I argue elsewhere (Bogár forthcoming), Vonnegut mingles
his identities as author of the novel with a tendency to penetrate his work and as Kurt
Vonnegut, an actually existing person, and thus creates a narrative with an inextricable,
circular structure.
Vonnegut pushes his novel’s fictitiousness to the fore to an almost awkward extent by
calling the readers’ attention, in the very beginning of the novel, to the otherwise well-known
fact that what they are to read here is nothing but fiction: a bunch of artfully structured lies, if
you like. Of course, one is generally already aware that information provided in a work of
fiction not necessarily matches the reality outside the novel. Vonnegut, however, makes it
overly clear that what he is writing must not be taken as true. We are presented with a
Vonnegutian version of the Liar Paradox: if nothing in this book is true, then the inscription is
also not true, meaning that nothing in this book is not true, that is, things in this book are true.
But then the inscription is also true, which means that nothing in this book is true, and so on
ad infintum. The inscription in page vii of Cat’s Cradle makes the narrative an example of
that which Douglas R. Hofstadter calls ‘strange loops’ or ‘tangled hierarchies’. These
phenomena occur when

something in the system jumps out and acts on the system, as if it were outside the
system. What bothers us is perhaps an ill-defined sense of topological wrongness: the
inside-outside distinction is being blurred, as in the famous shape called a “Klein
bottle.”2 (Hofstadter 1979: 686)

Through this inscription, Vonnegut jumps out of the system (the novel) and acts on it (negates
it) from the outside, thus turning the novel into “a book of triply ironic negation” (Abádi-
Nagy 1996, 86).
Excessive authorial presence in the text, providing readers with information at a near-
absurdity rate, and self-negation are recurrent, key elements of Vonnegut’s style of writing,
examples of which abound both in his fiction and non-fiction works. “You understand, of
course, that everything I say is horseshit” (Standish 1973: 77); this is how Vonnegut begins
his reply to a question by Steven Standish concerning the Tralfamadorian view of time
presented in Slaughterhouse-Five. Right off the bat, he inserts a disclaimer that lingers above

1
This of course raises questions such as what exactly is the difference between a book and a novel, where is the
boundary between the two (if any), what parts and segments does a book have, etc., many of which I consider in
a forthcoming paper.
2
The Klein bottle is a so-called “pathological surface” (Bonahon 2009: 95); for more information, see Bonahon
(2009) as well as www.kleinbottle.com.
the text (in that case, his reply) ever after, questioning every sentence, every word he writes or
utters.
This is how most of Vonnegut’s works operate: in Cat’s Cradle, it is especially
emphatic. This tendency toward self-negation is a key ingredient, the essential core in the
sarcasm so characteristic of his thought and writings: in a way, his oeuvre, and Cat’s Cradle
in it, may be read as the anatomy of acrid, sarcastic humor.

References

Abádi-Nagy, Zoltán (1996) ‘Bokononism as a Structure of Ironies,’ in Peter J. Reed & Marc
Leeds, eds. (1996) The Vonnegut Chronicles : Interviews and Essays (Westport, CT:
Greenwood)
Bogár, Ádám T. (forthcoming) ‘Not Dead just Unalive : Authorship and Artificiality in Kurt
Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle,’ in Piotr Kawulok et al., eds. (forthcoming) Specters of the
Author (Cracow: Jagiellonian UP)
Bonahon, Francis (2009) Low-Dimensional Geometry : From Euclidean Surfaces to
Hyperbolic Knots (Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society)
Hofstadter, Douglas R. (1979) Gödel, Escher, Bach : an Eternal Golden Braid
(Harmondsworth: Penguin)
Standish, Steve (1973) ‘The Playboy Interview,’ in William Rodney Allen, ed. (1988)
Conversations with Kurt Vonnegut (Jackson: U of Mississippi P)
Thomas, Paul Lee (2006) Reading, Learning, Teaching Kurt Vonnegut (New York: Peter
Lang)
Vonnegut, Kurt (1963) Cat’s Cradle (New York: Delacorte)
Wharton, David Michael (2003) ‘Dubious Truths: An Examination of Vonnegut’s Cat’s
Cradle,’ in Strange Horizons, 24 Mar. 2003