ABSTRACT
Utilising Bergson’s famous theory of laughter, this chapter examines the potency, centrality, and pseudo-agency of the ice-nine molecule in Cat’s Cradle (1963), charting its conception, development, and eventual apotheosis via the comedic action of the novel. Bergsonian comedy relies on rigidity and stereotype, stemming from the conflict between spirit, equated with life and the organic, and matter, equated with the inanimate and inorganic. As the characters and the world of the novel move inexorably toward permanent stasis, the comedic elements similarly dwindle. At its conclusion, a bizarre new inorganic ecology emerges, and the text remains suspended between humour and nihilism. I conclude that both Bergson and Vonnegut were reacting to scientific advancements that began in Bergson’s time and which were well advanced by Vonnegut’s. Bergson spent his career resisting what seemed to be an encroachment by empiricism and determinism into all other aspects of living. Vonnegut, by contrast, though clearly concerned with determinism’s consequences, seems to have largely accepted its conclusions. For Vonnegut, the question is not whether man is wholly subject to physical laws but what one is to do (or is capable of doing) in the circumstances of such inevitability.
