This is the second time I’m reading this book. Going to try and pay a little more attention to it this time, and write down my thoughts chapter by chapter as I go. I’ll add a review of the book when I finish.
Chapter Notes:
1. The Day the World Ended
Call me Jonah
I read Moby Dick early this year and liked it, so good start in my opinion. I’m primed to look for whale references and also overt copying.
Ishmael is obviously not Ishmael’s name, but Melville doesn’t say so in the next sentence. Vonnegut is obvious in a way Melville isn’t. So Jonah just out and tells you about his book about spirituality and the end of the world. Maybe I should reread Father Mapple’s sermon on Jonah.
There is some inversion between Ishmael being swept along on this apocalyptic spiritual quest and writing Moby Dick vs Jonah trying to write a pointed spiritual apocalyptic book and getting swept into Bokononism. Or maybe it’s a parallel. I’ll have to check in on this once I’ve finished.
Bokononism in chapters 1 thru 4
His description of Bokononism seems easy going, except it’s not making his life any easier, judging by the count of former wives, booze, and a quarter million cigarettes.
A team (karass) does God’s will without knowing what they are doing.
If you find your life tangled up with somebody else’s life for no very logical reasons," writes Bokonon, “that person may be a member of your karass.”
It is as free-form as an amoeba
You can try to find out what your karass is up to, but it will be incomplete. Jonah is writing this book (instead of his original incomplete book) to examine what his was doing.
The final opening point of Bokononism from the opening chapters is that it is all made up:
The first sentence in The Books of Bokonon is this:
“All of the ture things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”
My Bokononist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book either.
5. Letter from a Pre-med
Dr. Felix Hoenikker is playing with a piece of string at home the day the bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. Though Newt says it is the only time he played anything that could be called a game. Play as a useful form of thinking. Does play fit into Bokononism?
Hoenikker’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech:
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.
He is very isolated from his family and the world though.
Also some synchronicity with the string coming off a manuscript of a novel about the end of the world in 2000 from a bomb. Synchronicity fits in with Bokononism I think.
6. Bug Fights
They won’t fight unless you keep shaking the jar. And that’s what Frank was doing, shaking, shaking, the jar.
A little background on Frank, who disappeared, and Angela, the oldest sibling, who took care of the family after the mother died when Newt was born.
9. Vice-president in charge of Volcanoes, 10. Secret Agent X-9
A couple tidbits:
- “Likes and dislikes have nothing to do with it” Bokonon on who is in your karass.
- Dr. Hoenikker was an uncontrollable force of nature.
- Franklin was also very isolated, no friends, “always acting like he was on his way between two secret places”, and didn’t do much.
we had both overestimated our apathies, but not by much.
These first few chapters present Jonah poorly, but that line really cements it for me. Disinterested, and wishy washy about disinterest.
12. End of the World Delight
Asa Breed’s son quit his job at the research library the day the bomb was dropped.
13. The Jumping-off Point, 14. When Automobiles Had Cut-glass Vases
Background for the alleged relationship between Dr. Breed and Emily, Dr. Hoenikker’s wife. Allegedly Breed was the father of all 3 Hoenikker children.
Weird science attitudes, chapters 9, 15 thru 18
Dr. Breed very into scientism it seems. Or something like scientism.
Back in chapter 9, Sandra talks about Dr. Breed’s commencement speech at her graduation:
“The trouble with the world was,” she continued hesitatingly, “That people were still superstitious instead of scientific. He said that if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.”
In chapters 15 and 16 Miss Pefko sees science as magic even though she has access to some to explain things for her and she is encouraged to ask.
“I think you’ll find,” said Dr. Breed, “that everybody does about the same amount of thinking. Scientists simply think about things in one way, and the other people think about things in others.”
The girl pool girls in chapter 17 are on an even lower rung. Dr. Breed doesn’t even consider the possibility of their understanding.
Somehow old Miss Faust fits in. Not sure why she’s named Faust. I can’t guess what benefit she traded to get that left her a desiccated secretary for her entire career.
In chapter 18 Jonah intentionally or not accuses everyone on the project of being “criminal accessories to murder most foul” and Breed is offended.
“I’m sick of people misunderstand what a scientist is, what a scientist does.” “… what pure research is.”
“It isn’t looking for a better cigarette filter or a softer face tissue or a longer-lasting house paint, God help us. Everybody talks about research and practically nobody in this country’s doing it. We’re one of the few companies that actually hires men to do pure research.
skipping some lines, this is page 35 & 36:
“Here, and shockingly few other places in this country, men are paid to increase knowledge, to work toward no end but that.”
“That’s very generous […]
“Nothing generous about it. New knowledge is the most valuble commodity on earth. The more truth we have to work with, the richer we become.” Had I been a Bokononist then, that statement would have made me howl.
Side note about Asa Breed’s name: either it’s a reference to the allegation of fathering the Hoenikker children, or it’s a play on the phrase “as a bred …”.
For example: As a breed scientists are very self absorbed and self important.
19. No More Mud
Play comes up again. (see chapter 5 notes for the first example of Hoenikker playing with string). Dr. Breed starts by explaining that the work of the scientists isn’t directed, “it isn’t in the nature of a pure-research man to pay any attention to suggestions.” While talking about the mud problem posed by the marine general, Breed says:
“In his playful way, and all his ways were playful, Felix suggested that there might be a single grain of something– […]”
This self-direction and play seem to be what separate the real research scientists from the hack technicians. But also what leaves them so separated from society. And what makes them self important.
20. Ice-nine, also 21 thru 24
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disappearing_polymorph is the context for ice-nine.
Vonnegut again being heavy handed with the foreshadowing: “The hopes and fears of all the years are here with us tonight”
“Now suppose,” chortled Dr. Breed, enjoying himself, “that there were many possible ways in which water could crystallize, could freeze. …”
In chapter 21 triumphant rhetoric that sounds familiar:
“And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!”
In chapter 22 Breed gets angry about Jonah asking whether it’s real, and even angrier as Jonah thinks through the results. Contrasts with how happy he is (chortled) to talk about it in abstract, but gets angry about the externalities.
From chapter 23:
Ice-nine was the last gift Felix Hoenikker created for mankind before going to his just reward.
First, that sounds like a negative judgment based on the last few chapters. Second, each child has some now. Why did they divide it? Why did they keep it secret? Why did they each want some? They could have destroyed it by heating to 114.4F.
And in chapter 24 we learn a wampeter is the thing a karass orbits, and ice-nine is it for his.
25. The Main Thing About Dr. Hoenikker
Miss Faust on Dr. Hoenikker:
“I don’t think he was knowable.”
“I just have trouble understanding how truth, all by itself, could be enough for a person.” Miss Faust was ripe for Bokoninism.
See post https://bsky.app/profile/harrisj.bsky.social/post/3lcdtyl3q422b
Bokononism does feel like a religion for the terminally online 🧊
On a bit more serious note though this does show Hoenikker as a very thought-centered person, as opposed to emotional or relational. Not sure if there is enough info to translate this into a thought vs. intuition frame though.
26. What God Is
“But God really is love, you know,* said Miss Faust, *no matter what Dr. Hoenikker said”.
Interesting that Vonnegut just leaves that there without further comment. Or is it. The point is to show Dr. Hoenikker as rude. And another point is to show what it means that Miss Faust is ready for Bokononism.
27. Men from Mars, 28. Mayonaise
More references to play: “the quantity of cheap toys lying around” his old laboratory.
Also, it turns out that methods of stacking cannonballs was an ongoing interest of his, presumably going back for some time. So the idea of a polymorph crystal wasn’t new to him.
In chapter 28 Lyman Enders Knowles the elevator operator is a wild caricature and tells a bunch of jokes. I’m tempted to do the whole “comparative madness” thing from Moby Dick, comparing the various characters so far, but it mostly seems not worth it. The “re-search” joke may have enough to work with, but mostly they’re just jokes and puns.
29. Gone, but Not Forgotten, 30. Only Sleeping
“alabaster phallus twenty feet high and three feet thick” vs 40cm cube? Emily’s monument is obvious enough for the cab driver to say something obscene about it, so it’s probably not just an obelisk.
31. Another Breed
When the cab driver wanted to go to the tombstone sales room:
I wasn’t a Bokononist then, so I agreed with some peevishness. As a Bokononist, of course, I would have agreed gaily to go anywhere anyone suggested. As Bokonon says: “Peculiar travel suggestions are dancing lessons from God.”
Avram Breed - great grandfather of Asa and the tombstone salesman Marvin. I’m not sure if Marvin Breed fit’s into my naming theory. Oh well.
Does anyone know how Vonnegut’s thoughts on writing relate with those on pure research? Novel writing vs journalism –> pure research vs hack technicians That may be a junk idea.
32. Dynamite Money
Marvin thinks Hoenikker was “one queer sone of a bitch.” They have a brief exchange about how odd that Nobel prize money went to Emily’s tombstone and a cottage on Cape Cod.
Had I been a Bokononist then, pondering the miraculously intricate chain of events that had brought dynamite money to that particular tombstone company, I might have whispered “Busy, busy busy.”
Busy, busy, busy, is what we Bokononists whisper whenever we think of how complicated and unpredictable the machinery of live really is.
But all I could say as a Christian then was, “Life is sure funny sometimes.”
33. An Ungrateful Man
So Marvin Breed took up violin because he fell for Emily, but when his older brother Asa stole her he smashed it and mailed it to her in a box meant for roses?
He doesn’t buy the innocent idea of Hoenikker:
“But,” he said, “how the hell innocent is a man who helps make a think like an atom bomb?”
And says Emily was “dying for lack of love and understanding . . .” The chapter ends with:
He shuddered, “Sometimes I wonder if he wasn’t born dead. I never met a man who was less interested in the living. Sometimes I think that’s the trouble with the world: too many people in high places who are stone-cold dead.”
34. Vin-dit
Vin-dit is not too far off from something that could be described as “a personal encounter with God.” Vin-dit is:
a sudden, very personal shove in the direction of Bokononism, in the direction of believing that God Almighty knew all about me, after all, that God Almight had some pretty elaborate plans for me.
Marvin says Hoenikker never did anything he didn’t want to and got anything he wanted. They gossip about the children and Marvin says Frank was to cowardly to be criminal, just into model-making. Asa’s son who quit the day the bomb was dropped is now a stone cutter in Italy.
Then it’s revealed that the name on the angel statue the cab drive has been asking about, carved by breed’s great-grandfather and never paid for, had Jonah’s last name on it:
The room seemed to tip, and its walls and ceiling and floor were transformed momentarily into the mouths of many tunnels–tunnels leading in all directions through time. I had a Bokononist vision of the unity in every second of all time and all wandering mankind, all wandering womankind, all wandering children.
Note the unity of all.
35. Hobby Shop, 36. Meow
Jack the hobby shop guy really liked Frank, and Frank had nothing going on outside of model building.
From chapter 36 I see that I had the timeline of the first chapter wrong, his second wife had left him already left him when he made the Ilium trip “on the grounds that I was too pessimistic for an optimist to live with.” For the trip he let the nihilistic poet in favor of nuclear war Sherman Krebs stay in his apartment, and Krebs trashed it.
Krebs who trashed the apartment was part of his karass and served the function of wrang-wrang, his nihilism turning Jonah away from nihilism.
Well done, Mr. Krebs, well done.
37. A Modern Major General, 38, 39. Fata Morgana
He finds out that Franklin is in San Lorenzo from an ad for the country.
Describes Mona Aamons Monzano as “mongrel Madonna” wat
In chapter 38 it turns out Frank is there because papa thinks the blood descendant of Dr Hoenikker is important. Jonah suspects superstition.
Chapter 39 includes a description of Frank’s trip from Cuba to San Lorenzo, where he crashed a sinking boat on the shores of San Lorenzo “as though God wanted him to go there.” The Hoenikker name is why he went from prisoner without a passport to Major General.