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

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šŸ“š The Good Books

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

Vonnegut's hopeful humanist fatalism

Blake Chastain
Jan 25
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šŸ“šThe Comfort of Fictional Religions: Bokononism, a useful religion founded on lies

www.postevangelicalpost.com

This entry in The Good Books is part of my series ā€œThe Comfort of Fictional Religions.ā€ See prior entries here.

And come see me, Brad Onishi of SWAJ, and Tim Whitaker of The New Evangelicals in Philly on 2/11!

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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 Vonnegut’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

I’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 couldn’t touch. I had read A Farewell to Arms, but that pessimism was different than the fatalism I found in Vonnegut.

Many of Vonnegut’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 it’s in Cat’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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