End Times--"No Cat, No Cradle"

A few days before we started discussing the end times I finished reading the book Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut, which is a profoundly mythological work that centers around the story of the end of the world as we know it. It involves a made up religion called Bokonism that professes it self as lies all fabricated to comfort humans in the face of meaningless. Bokonism even includes its own mythological creation story.  The novel focuses on the creator of the atomic bomb, which is alluded to as the end of the world due to our own knowledge. Which is extremely biblical and mythological, the idea that we know what we shouldn't, that we've seen what we ought not have.  The end civilization in Cat's Cradle comes at the hands of an invention that essentially turns the whole world to ice. End times are ushered in at the hands of our own knowledge. The whole novel is a great allegory of the human quest for meaning, a quest that is perhaps is fruitless. As suggested in tis quote:

“No wonder kids grow up crazy. A cat's cradle is nothing but a bunch of X's between somebodies hands, and little kids look and look and look at all those X's . . ."

"And?"

"No damn cat, and no damn cradle.”

When I read that of course immediately thought of the "referential mania" in Nabokov’s short story. And then I reread that verse in Ecclesiastes that says: 

                                       "Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher; all is vanity."

And then I thought of how "Vanity" refers to the Hebrew term hebel meaning "mere breath", and in the NIV version it actually uses the word "meaningless" instead of vanity.

 I was slightly intellectually overwhelmed at how everything started connecting to everything else, and even more so by the thought that I was finding so much meaning in all these things saying there is no meaning.  There were so many connections that I found it really hard to mentally organize them enough for this post, which is why I'm sure it seems rambling. I'm also sure there are a ton more mythological references and connections in Cat's Cradle but I'll leave those for my final paper.