Kurt Vonnegut, like so many other writers before him, has taken up the role of humanities critic. He is a satirist. His works cause us to laugh out loud at the stupidity of human behavior, and then recoil in self-defense. Like all satirists, Vonnegut mercilessly takes aim at the unholy truths on mankind. It is, however, his weapon and his approach that makes him stand out from all the rest. His characters are insane. So insane that they epitomize the very extreme of human traits. It is with their insanity that he points out the insanity of human behavior that we have come to label as, well, sane. In his novels, Kurt Vonnegut uses socially irrational characters to make rational social statements.
             In his novel Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut parades a circus of instability around one central, sane, character. The narrator, John, is researching a book about what certain Americans were doing on the day the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. One of these individuals is Dr. Felix Hoenikker, the father of the atom bomb. In researching him, John contacts an array of characters including the Doctor's disoriented children, the dictator of a Caribbean island nation, and the founder of an admittedly false religion. The underlying theme of the novel is that of human stupidity and irresponsibility. Though it tackles human idiocy in other forms as well as with mad scientists, the New York Times calls it: "an irreverent and often highly entertaining fantasy concerning the playful irresponsibility of nuclear scientists." (Southern, p1)
             Dr. Felix Hoenikker, like most of Vonnegut's characters, is not all together sane. He epitomizes the mad scientist mindset that is displayed in technological advancement. He has no regard for people, completely indifferent to everyone, including his own family. When his wife died, he never bothered to mark her grave with a tombstone, and his teen-aged daughter, a sophomore i...