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๐Ÿ“šThe Comfort of Fictional Religions: Bokononism, a useful religion founded on lies
๐Ÿ“š The Good Books

๐Ÿ“šThe Comfort of Fictional Religions: Bokononism, a useful religion founded on lies

Vonnegut's hopeful humanist fatalism

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Blake Chastain
Jan 25, 2023
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๐Ÿ“šThe Comfort of Fictional Religions: Bokononism, a useful religion founded on lies
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This entry in The Good Books is part of my series โ€œThe Comfort of Fictional Religions.โ€ See prior entries here.

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Cat's Cradle (1st ed. cover) - Vonnegut.jpg
Jacket design by Ben Feder, Inc - Heritage Auctions. Cropped and retouched by uploader., Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=81497192

I first discovered Vonnegutโ€™s writing while in undergrad. I attended Indiana Wesleyan, and while I graduated with a writing major, I never took any lit classes that actually assigned Vonnegut.1

Iโ€™m fairly certain that my first Vonnegut book was, predictably, Slaughterhouse Five, which I loved. There was something about his prose that was so economical, but evoked a type of emotion that other minimalist authors like Hemingway couldnโ€™t touch. I had read A Farewell to Arms, but that pessimism was different than the fatalism I found in Vonnegut.

Many of Vonnegutโ€™s books are about protagonists stuck in inescapable circumstances: the unstuck-in-time Billy Pilgrim, Howard Campbell, Jr. awaiting his trial for war crimes, Jonah on assignment in San Lorenzo, the entire goddam universe experiencing locked-in syndrome for 10 years in Timequake. But itโ€™s in Catโ€™s Cradle where Vonnegut gives his characters a religion to cope with the circumstances they find themselves in. That religion is Bokononism.

Bokononism is a false religion. It makes no bones about that, even within the fictional text:

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