Bokonon

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Evil-doer
Full Name	Lionel Boyd Johnson
Alias	Bokonon
Origin	Cat's Cradle
Occupation	Soldier (formerly) Leader of Bokononism
Powers / Skills	Persuasion Intelligence Manipulation
Goals	Spread his religion (succeeded for a while).
Crimes	Indirect mass murder Enforced suicide Unlawful executions (indirectly) Incitement
Type of Villain	Misanthropic Cult Leader

“	All of the true things that I am about to tell you are shameless lies.	„
	~ Bokonon's paradox.

“	If I were a younger man, I would write a history of human stupidity; and I would climb to the top of Mount McCabe and lie down on my back with my history for a pillow; and I would take from the ground some of the blue-white poison that makes statues of men; and I would make a statue of myself, lying on my back, grinning horribly, and thumbing my nose at You Know Who.	„
	~ Bokonon's final line.

Bokonon, born as Lionel Boyd Johnson, is the main antagonist of Kurt Vonnegut's 1963 novel Cat's Cradle and its calypso musical adaptation.

He is a former soldier from Tobago who, along with Marine deserter corporal Earl McCabe, discovered the Caribbean island San Lorenzo. Deciding to fashion it into a utopia, Bokonon invented the theology of Bokononism which was built around community, cynicism and a sarcastic disdain for God.

In the 2022 production of the musical, he's played by Horace V. Rogers.

Biography

Past

Bokonon was born into a wealthy family in 1891. Though he wanted to get a degree in London School of Economics and Political Science, his education was interrupted by the Great War. In 1922, while seeking shelter from a hurricane in the then-Marine-occupied Haiti, he met McCabe, who bribed Bokonon to sail him to Miami.

However, their boat was wrecked and they washed ashore on the island of San Lorenzo. Here they found that the natives were living in squalor. The two men took control away from Castle Sugar, who were at the time the closest thing to a government on the island, and put themselves in charge. While McCabe overhauled the laws, Bokonon (who got the name from the locals pronouncing "Johnson" in their dialect) invented a new religion.

Realizing the truth that there was no way to seriously improve the conditions of this island, Bokonon decided to make his religion one of harmless untruths, lies that were better than reality. The sacred texts of Bokonon featured, along with many small calypso songs, rules for rituals, karasses (groups of people that were cosmically linked) and repetitions of the affirmation that, just by existing, its worshipers were living out God's will and fulfilling His purpose.

To give the religion more allure, he asked McCabe to assume the role of a bloodthirsty dictator and outlaw both Bokononism and Bokonon himself under penalty of death by the Hook (a hook upon which offenders were impaled and left to die). Bokonon exiled himself into the nearby jungle but continued to spread his religion, and soon, everyone on the island devoutly followed it, though they didn't publicly show it for fear of the Hook. To afford more credibility to the story, McCabe executed a Bokononist every two years. Over time, the two men became the roles they were playing.

McCabe eventually committed suicide, but Bokonon remained a figure of legend.

Cat's Cradle

Bokonon barely makes an appearance in the novel, but his religion drives the bulk of the story.

Near the end, when the narrator is supposed to be inaugurated as the new president of San Lorenzo, an airplane carrying the corpse of his predecessor, "Papa" Monzano, crashes into the sea. Monzano had killed himself by ritualistically swallowing ice-nine, the substance invented by the late Felix Hoenikker which turns any body of water into solid ice that can persist at room temperature upon collision. When the substance comes into contact with the ocean through Monzano's frozen corpse, all of the world's seas freeze and the planet is reduced to a wasteland.

Panicked, the people of San Lorenzo find Bokonon, crowd around him and ask him what to do. The cynical charlatan simply supposes that God is through with them and encourages them all to kill themselves. Thus, the thousands upon thousands of followers of Bokononism commit a ritualistic mass suicide by drinking ice-nine. Bokonon himself simply leaves a note and leaves the thousands of corpses behind.

The narrator and Mona, Monzana's adopted daughter, come across this mass grave. While the narrator is disgusted by Bokonon's actions, Mona is too dazed by all the tragedy to care any more. With an amused smile, she brings some ice-nine to her lips and kills herself.

The narrator at last finds Bokonon near Mount McCabe, the tallest mountain on San Lorenzo. Bokonon reveals he's working on the final sentence of his book and shows it to the narrator. He writes that if he were younger, he'd have written a book on human stupidity and committed suicide by consuming ice-nine while thumbing his nose at God.

Trivia

• The misanthropic words of Bokonon in his texts are theorized to, in some ways, reflect the views of Vonnegut himself.

External Links

• Bokonon on the Pure Evil Wiki