Vonnegut's Mother Night and Cat's Cradle
Throughout Kurt Vonnegut's writing, loneliness is often a characteristic of his major characters. Vonnegut shows how easily modern man can succumb to loneliness and how man reacts to this loneliness. In Mother Night as well as Cat's Cradle, key characters are in a state of solitude. Howard Campbell Jr. is in a situation very similar to the three Hoenikker children, Newt, Angela, and Frank. All four of these characters had a disturbing childhood, live an isolated adult life, and will do almost anything to remedy their loneliness. First of all, the connection between Howard Campbell and the Hoenikker children is formed during their respective childhoods. In Mother Night, Campbell's early life is anything but normal. His father's life was his job; he worked all the time. Campbell only mentions one instance where his father is not working. This memory is of a World War I book with morbid pictures of corpses; he remembers that his father often looked at this book but became angry when Howard looked at it. This is the anecdote Howard uses to describe his father, and his father is the normal one. Howard's mother was a drunk. Howard's mother would drink and do very morbid things. "And then she touched off the mixture
In Cat's Cradle, Vonnegut shows his readers dangerous a lonely man can be. Vonnegut gives three emotionally unstable people a means to end the world, ice nine. In this story, Vonnegut creates his characters with physical attributes that would make them live a life of solitude. Newt Hoenikker is a midget; his sister, Angela, is described as "a woman to whom God had given virtually nothing with which to catch a man," (Cat's Cradle, p.83); their brother, Frank, disappeared from the face of the Earth for several years. Newt and Angela are both slightly lonely characters, but they take refuge in their friendship with one another. Both Newt and Angela are easily engaged into relationships in which their ice nine is taken from them. Frank, however, rarely had a friend. In high school he was known as Secret Agent X-9 because he always hurried from one place to the next and never talked to anyone. Frank is described as "one of those kids who made model airplanes and jerked off all the time," (Cat's Cradle, p.25). He uses pieces of his ice nine to buy a position in the government of San Lorenzo. All three Hoenikkers use their most priced possession, ice nine, to buy some sort of power. This expresses their need to bond with someone. After Papa died Frank is to become president of San Lorenzo. He recognizes that he doesn't have the people skills required to run a country, so he delegates the narrator to become the president. In the end, Frank's loneliness causes the end of the world; his ice nine comes into contact with the ocean and freezes the world. Campbell and the Hoeinkkers lead very lonely lives, and many of their actions are a direct result of this loneliness. All of the characters are easily overcome by the opposite sex. Howard accepts his true love's younger sister as a lover, and Angela accepts a husband who she knows is only using her for her ice nine. Also, Newt spends a week in the arms of a Russian midget named Zinka. Somehow during their affair Zinka acquires some ice nine. The decade or so when Campbell lives in isolation in New Yo
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1399
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page double spaced)
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