Tommy Fancher
Mr. O'Brien
Novel and Drama
2 October 2014 "Fake Karass" All Bokonoists believe that humanity is broken up into teams, teams that do God's Will without ever discovering what they are doing. Such a team is called a "Karass".(Vonnegut 5) The complete opposite of this is a "Granfalloon". A granfalloon is defined as a "false karass" or a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the ways God gets things done.(Vonnegut 55) Vonnegut said "if you wish to study a granfalloon just remove the skin of a toy balloon".(Vonnegut 55) Granfalloons are nothing once you remove that outer layer, there is no meaning to them. Humanity must create these granfalloons in order to connect with something or else we are nothing. The …show more content…
state Indiana. Hazel Crosby was a big supporter of all Hoosiers and automatically loved the person if they were a hoosier. "I don't know what it is about Hoosiers," said Hazel but they've sure got something".(Vonnegut 55) In Cat's Cradle this is one of the biggest granfalloons in the book. Hazel said to John "whenever I meet a young Hoosier, I tell them, 'You call me Mom".(Vonnegut 55) When Hazel said this, she was taking being a "Hoosier" a little to far. Hazel represented "Patriotism" and Vonnegut was almost making fun of people who take that stuff to seriously. When Hazel meets a Hoosier she gets excited and feels better about life. She only does this to connect to something, so there is something …show more content…
"Like Betsy Ross, she was making an American flag".(Vonnegut 160) To Hazel it did not matter that the world was pretty much gone she still wanted to make that flag because of how much she loves America. Everything was gone in the world but making the flag was Hazel's way of making life "bearable". "No one was unkind enough to point out to her that the red was really a peach, that the blue was nearly a Kelly green, and that the fifty stars she had cut out were six-pointed stars of
David rather than five-pointed American stars".(Vonnegut 160) Although she had the flag all messed up, she did not care because it represented something bigger. It made her happy to see that flag all finished, and she wanted it on top of Mount McCabe. Not only are there Granfalloons in this book but we can also seem them in real life today. One of the biggest granfalloons is people who like the same sports teams. For example the Philadelphia Eagles. All Philadelphia fans are know as ruthless people because they are so mean to fans that are not Eagles fans. There's been some incidents were Eagles fans have either spit on someone wearing another jersey or purposefully spill their drink on them. It's all because they like a different team then them. In hindsight there is no good reason to like a sports team, it all ties back to Cat's Cradle