Editing Cat's Cradle (section)

===Background===
The [[first-person narrative|first-person]] [[everyman]] narrator opens the novel with "Call me Jonah. My parents did, or nearly did. They called me John", though neither name appears again throughout the novel. The narrator is a professional writer who frames the plot as a [[flashback (narrative)|flashback]] set in the mid-20th century, when he was planning to write a book called ''The Day the World Ended''. He describes his concept for that book as an account of what people were doing on the day of [[atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki|the atomic bombing of Hiroshima]]. Throughout, he also intersperses meaningful as well as sarcastic passages and sentiments from an odd religious scripture known as ''The Books of Bokonon''. Most of the events of the novel occur before the narrator was converted to his current religion, [[Bokononism]].