An Analysis of Religion Depicted Within the books, "The Cat's Cradle" and "Franny and Zooey"

Franny and Zooey by J.D Salinger and Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut each have characters that claim to practice a religion, which shapes the characters into the way they act and talk. In Cat’s Cradle, Jonah is a Bokononist, but was a Christian before that, and in Franny and Zooey, Franny practiced praying incessantly. Inside each of these novels, religion is a big part of the characters’ everyday lives, and shows by their conversations, actions, and problems.

Bokononist was unknown beyond the gravel beaches and coral knifes that ring the little island in the Caribbean Sea, the Republic of San Lorenzo. Followers of Bokononism believe that humanity is organized into teams or karasses, with teams doing God’s will without ever discovering what they are doing. Jonah’s karass includes the three children of Dr. Felix Hoenikker. Bokonon, the founder of the religion, warns that attempts to discover the purpose of one’s karass are destined to yield incomplete knowledge. Bokononism have views such as the wrang wrang, which is someone who forces another person to recognize that a particular line of reasoning is completely absurd, duprass, which is a karss consisting of only two people, grandfallon, a false karass such as political parties and nation-states, and a duffle, which is when the destiny of thousands rest in the hands of an ignorant child. Bokononism is taught in “The Books of Bokonon”, which is filled with lies. The first sentence says, “all of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies”. The book also states that when God created the earth, and he looked upon it in His cosmic loneliness. And God said, “Let Us make living creatures out of mud, so the mud can see what We have done”. It also asks, “what is the purpose of this, and then he wanted man to think of one for all this”.