The Books of Bokonon
From Cat's Cradle
By Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
Edited by Eugene Wallingford
wallingf@cs.uni.edu
Now available on Twitter at @BooksOfBokonon
Editor's Introduction
In Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., created a new religion, Bokononism. The holy scripture of Bokononism was the ever-growing "Books of Bokonon", written by Bokonon -- a British Episcopalian Negro from the island of Tobago whose real name was Lionel Boyd Johnson [ 48 ] -- as a way to distract the people of San Lorenzo from their pitiful lives. What is sacred to Bokononists? Not God; just one thing: man. [ 94 ]All material contained below was written by Kurt Vonnegut and scattered throughout Cat's Cradle wherever it best suited the novel. I have merely tabulated -- as best I could -- his snippets into an order that one might find in a real copy of the Books of Bokonon. I have also tried to cross-reference these snippets to the numbered sections of the novel, where you may read of scripture in the context of Vonnegut's story.
Index to The Books of Bokonon
- The Books
- The Calypsos
- The Autobiographical Section
- Unreferenced Verses and Stories
- The Final Sentence of The Books of Bokonon
- Dictionary of Terms
- Also by Bokonon
The Fourteenth Book
[ A short book with a long title. [ 110 ] ]Title: What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?
Only verse: Nothing.
THOUGHT QUESTION: Who is in your karass*?
*A karass is a "team [of people] that do[es] God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing". [ 1 ] Humanity is organized into many such teams. One can try to discover "the limits of [one's] karass and the nature of the work God Almighty has had it do ... but such investigations are bound to be incomplete." [ 2 ]
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