Cat's Cradle
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50 free Cat's Cradle trivia questions with answers — literature quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Cat's Cradle is the novel that made Kurt Vonnegut a cult author: a short, savage comedy about a writer who goes looking for the children of a bomb-maker and ends up watching the world end. Along the way it invents a substance that can freeze every ocean and a religion that admits it is made of lies, and readers have been quoting both ever since. This quiz follows the story from the narrator's first letter to the Hoenikker family, through the laboratories of Ilium, to the island republic of San Lorenzo and the last page. It covers the characters and what becomes of them, ice-nine and how it spreads, the rituals and vocabulary of Bokononism, and the real science and history that Vonnegut drew on when he wrote the book. It works as a comprehension check after a first reading, as revision for a class or book club, or as a test for anyone who has loved the novel for years. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In Cat's Cradle, ice-nine is first imagined as a cure for which battlefield nuisance facing soldiers?
Mud
Mud was the complaint: an officer was sick of troops wallowing in it, so Felix Hoenikker imagined a crystal that would turn it solid. The same crystal could lock up every ocean on Earth.
Q 02Which rock band named its music publishing company after ice-nine, the doomsday substance in Cat's Cradle?
The Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead called their publishing company Ice Nine. Jerry Garcia was fan enough to buy the film rights to another Vonnegut novel, The Sirens of Titan, though he never got it filmed.
Q 03The University of Chicago accepted Cat's Cradle as Kurt Vonnegut's master's thesis in which academic field?
Anthropology
Anthropology was the degree, granted about 25 years after he left Chicago without it. The department had rejected his earlier thesis ideas, one of them on the shapes of stories.
Q 04In Cat's Cradle, Bokononists perform the ritual of boko-maru by pressing together which parts of the body?
The soles of their feet
The soles of their feet meet, bare, in what the faith treats as its highest act of worship. Mona refuses to marry the narrator unless she may go on sharing the ritual with others.
Q 05The opening sentence of Cat's Cradle echoes the famous first line of which classic novel?
Moby-Dick
Moby-Dick begins with its narrator telling readers what to call him, and Vonnegut's narrator does the same. Both storytellers also live through a disaster that kills nearly everyone around them.
Q 06The narrator of Cat's Cradle plans a book on what prominent people were doing as which city was bombed?
Hiroshima
Hiroshima is his subject, and the working title is The Day the World Ended. Chasing the story of a scientist behind the weapon leads him to the three Hoenikker children instead.
Q 07In Cat's Cradle, Hazel Crosby urges every fellow native of which US state to call her Mom?
Indiana
Indiana is her badge of kinship, and Bokononism mocks such pride as an empty bond. Vonnegut, born in the state himself, was teasing his own tribe of Hoosiers.
Q 08In Cat's Cradle, what gruesome penalty officially awaits anyone caught practising Bokononism on San Lorenzo?
Impalement on a hook
Impalement on a hook is the law, yet almost nobody suffers it, because nearly the whole island, dictator included, follows the banned faith in secret.
Q 09Once the seas turn solid at the climax of Cat's Cradle, which violent weather ravages the Earth?
Tornadoes
Tornadoes fill the sky for days, while the narrator and Mona wait them out beneath the palace. They climb out to an island where almost nobody is left alive.
Q 10Ilium, the laboratory town in Cat's Cradle, shares its name with the Latin name for which ancient city?
Troy
Troy was Ilium to the Romans, a grand name for Vonnegut's invented factory town in New York State. He set several other novels and stories in the same place.
Q 11In the first sentence of Cat's Cradle, the narrator asks readers to call him by which biblical name?
Jonah
Jonah is the name he asks for, though his parents called him John. After that first page, neither name is ever used in the novel again.
Q 12In Cat's Cradle, what is the Bokononist word for a team of people unknowingly doing God's will together?
Karass
Karass is the word, and the narrator counts the three Hoenikker children among the members of his own. Bokonon adds that anyone who thinks he understands God's plan is a fool, himself included.
Q 13Which instrument does the lonely Angela Hoenikker play with startling brilliance in Cat's Cradle?
Clarinet
Clarinet music is her one escape, and it becomes her end: after the catastrophe she blows on a contaminated mouthpiece and is turned to ice-nine.
Q 21H. Lowe Crosby flies to San Lorenzo in Cat's Cradle hoping to move his factory making which product?
Bicycles
Bicycles are his trade, and he wants cheap island labour that will not answer back. He and his wife Hazel end up among the handful of people who outlive the catastrophe.
Q 22In Cat's Cradle, many of the sacred verses in The Books of Bokonon are written as which kind of song?
Calypsos
Calypsos carry much of Bokonon's teaching, a nod to the Caribbean setting. In 2008 a New York theatre company staged the whole novel as a musical in the same style.
Q 23In the final lines of Cat's Cradle, Bokonon says that if he were younger he would write a history of what?
Human stupidity
Q 14Newt Hoenikker, the youngest of the family in Cat's Cradle, devotes himself to which art form?
Painting
Painting is his pastime, and his canvases are scratchy black abstracts. One of them, he says, shows the string figure of the title, in which he can see neither cat nor cradle.
Q 15In Cat's Cradle, what job does a nervous Frank Hoenikker pass on to the narrator on San Lorenzo?
The presidency
The presidency was meant for Frank, the dying dictator's chosen heir, but he dreads public life. The narrator accepts once he learns that marriage to Mona comes with the post.
Q 16What crashes into the cliff beneath the palace in Cat's Cradle, tipping the frozen body of "Papa" Monzano into the sea?
A fighter plane
A fighter plane catches fire during an air show and hits the cliff below the palace, and part of the building slides into the sea with the body. Every ocean, river and spring on Earth then locks solid.
Q 17Ilium, the Hoenikkers' city in Cat's Cradle, is also where Billy Pilgrim lives in which later novel?
Slaughterhouse-Five
Slaughterhouse-Five makes Billy Pilgrim an optometrist in Ilium, the same town where the Hoenikkers grew up. The place closely resembles Schenectady, where Vonnegut once worked in publicity.
Q 18Kurt Vonnegut drew the research laboratory in Cat's Cradle from his publicity job at which real company?
General Electric
General Electric paid him to interview its scientists and turn their work into good stories. He came away feeling that the older ones did not care how their discoveries were used.
Q 19In Cat's Cradle, why does Bokonon ask for his own religion to be outlawed on San Lorenzo?
To make it more alluring
To make it more alluring, Bokonon has his faith banned and goes into pretend hiding in the jungle. The trick works: nearly everyone on the island becomes a secret believer.
Q 20In Cat's Cradle, which illness is slowly killing "Papa" Monzano before he swallows ice-nine?
Cancer
Cancer has him bedridden and in agony, so he ends things with the sliver of ice-nine he wears in a cylinder round his neck. His doctor touches the body and is turned to ice too.
Human stupidity would be his subject, and he pictures lying down with the book on the island's highest peak. There he would swallow ice-nine and die making a rude gesture at God.
Q 24Cat's Cradle was shortlisted in 1964 for which honour given to the year's best science fiction novel?
Hugo Award
Hugo Award voters shortlisted it, as they had The Sirens of Titan before it. Vonnegut himself thought the science fiction label too limiting a description of his work.
Q 25The idea behind ice-nine in Cat's Cradle was first offered in the 1930s to which visiting British author?
H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells was touring the laboratory when a chemist pitched him a story about ice that stays solid at room temperature. He never used it, so Vonnegut later claimed the idea for himself.
Q 26Which Bokononist word in Cat's Cradle names a proud but meaningless group, such as a nation?
Granfalloon
Granfalloon is the label, and Vonnegut liked it enough to put it in the title of a 1974 essay collection. The members of one share little beyond a name.
Q 27In Cat's Cradle, which Bokononist word means the harmless untruths that believers are urged to live by?
Foma
Foma are the comforting lies at the heart of the faith, and Bokonon cheerfully admits that his whole religion is built on them. The island's poverty, he decided, was past curing by truth.
Q 28Horlick Minton, who gives a bitter speech on war in Cat's Cradle, comes to San Lorenzo in which post?
US ambassador
US ambassador is his new post, years after he was fired when a letter by his wife got him branded soft on communism. Minutes after his speech mourning young soldiers, he and his wife are swept into the sea hand in hand.
Q 29In Cat's Cradle, what does the reformed millionaire Julian Castle run in the jungle of San Lorenzo?
A charity hospital
A charity hospital, the House of Hope and Mercy in the Jungle, is where Castle has spent twenty years treating the island's poor. The narrator's magazine assignment is to profile him.
Q 30With Bokononism outlawed in Cat's Cradle, which religion does San Lorenzo officially claim as its own?
Christianity
Christianity is the official creed, which is why a minister is sent for when the dictator lies dying. "Papa" Monzano sends him away and takes the Bokononist last rites instead.