Cryptonomicon
88 pages • 2-hour read
Neal StephensonCryptonomicon
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Symbols & Motifs
Content Warning: This section includes discussion of wartime violence.
Cryptography, Codes, and Cryptocurrency
Cryptography, codes, and cryptocurrency form important motifs in the novel. The soldiers and officers in Cryptonomicon view cryptography as a means of winning the war. Though they may not understand how the enemies’ codes are broken, they appreciate the opportunity to read the enemies’ plans without their knowing. In cryptography, they have a key weapon in an apocalyptic battle. However, if the enemies’ actions are constantly preempted, then the enemies will change their codes and so the military will lose the ability to predict their enemies’ actions. Thus, cryptography represents a moral dilemma in its use. The officers knowingly send men to their deaths to prevent the enemy from learning that their ciphers have been broken. Cryptography, in this sense, symbolizes the complex morality of war, even in the seemingly simple moral context of the apocalyptic battle.
By the 1990s, the novel suggests that cryptography has metamorphosed into cryptocurrency, a form of digital money that is untethered from traditional economic systems and which depends on codes and cryptography for its security. In the novel, this form of cryptographic digital money represents—at least to characters such as Randy and Avi—freedom. They believe in the benefits of decentralized money, since money represents power at its most basic level. By removing autocratic governments’ control over economies and currencies, they think they offer a new kind of freedom to the people living in such countries. The alienation and bigotry of such regimes can be swept aside, turning cryptocurrency into a symbolic consequence of what earlier characters fought for. Randy and Avi’s views thus show how similar ideas can have different symbolic meanings to different characters at different times.
Gold and Golgotha
Gold and Golgotha are important symbols in the text. Throughout Cryptonomicon, the characters witness the movement, storage, and disbursement of a vast quantity of gold. German and Japanese soldiers have taken gold—the literal wealth—from the countries that they have invaded. While the Nazis and the Japanese Imperial Army announce their rigid belief in their own superiority, both ethnic and moral, the plundering of so much gold symbolizes the vapidity and the hypocrisy of their ideas. In spite of their claims, they are little more than any other looting army in history. For Rudy, the experience of visiting the treasure-laden train of Hermann Göring confirms his belief in the moral desolation of the Nazis. Rudy justifies his subterfuge by remembering the gold that Göring has stolen, thus justifying his own later attempts to redistribute this gold as part of a conspiracy.
Goto Dengo sees the treasure being shipped into the vault that he has built. The gold is a damning indictment of the army in which he once proudly fought, while also a demonstration that—at least at the top level—the Japanese army no longer believes that they will win the war. He begins to name the vault “Golgotha,” the Aramaic name for the place where Jesus Christ was crucified in Jerusalem. This choice of name is symbolic, foreshadowing Goto Dengo’s later conversion to Christianity and his attempt to seek redemption. The storage vault for so much gold becomes the means Goto Dengo seeks to atone for his sins. He makes subtle changes to the design which allow him to save a number of the workers from the project, as well as himself.
Following the defeat of the Japanese army, the gold in Golgotha is buried and presumed lost. The vast quantity of gold lies hidden in the mountains as a symbolic reminder of how much was taken during the destruction of World War II. Only when Randy and Avi approach Goto Dengo and reveal their plan to use the gold as a basis for digital money do they present him with a means of turning Golgotha into a force for good. The gold is melted down in a physical sense, but the melting of the gold and the destruction of Golgotha become a symbolic act of redemption, finally attempting to undo the damage done when the gold was originally stolen.
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