Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Cat’s Cradle, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Science and Morality
Religion
Governance, Politics, and Nationhood
Absurdity and Meaninglessness
Summary
Analysis
Sometimes, John tells the reader, the “pool-pah” (the Bokononist term for “shit-storm”) is beyond the “power of humans to comment.” John realizes that, with Angela and Newt also having traded ice-nine for personal gain, the American and Soviet governments must have its technology too. Angela, trying to defend Newt, says that Zinka stole ice-nine from him; he didn’t give it to her.
The brilliance of Vonnegut’s absurdity is that it is totally grounded in factual reality. At the height of the cold war, with the two great powers, the U.S. and the Soviet Union, both possessing nuclear capabilities, there was a genuine fear that the human race might annihilate itself. For Vonnegut, fact is stranger than fiction.
Themes
John wonders, “what hope can there be for mankind … when there are such men as Felix Hoenikker to give such playthings as ice-nine to such short-sighted children as almost all men and women are?” He recalls a question from The Fourteenth Book of Bokonon, which asks “What Can a Thoughtful Man Hope for Mankind on Earth, Given the Experience of the Past Million Years?” The answer is “Nothing,” and this question and answer constitute the entire fourteenth book.
Substitute “atomic bomb,” or “hydrogen bomb,” for “ice-nine” and the predicament outlined by John is utterly real. The fourteenth book of Bokonon encapsulates the idea that humankind is inherently hopeless.
Themes
