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
During John and Mona’s first twenty-four hours in the oubliette, tornadoes rattle overhead. John tries the radio, but there is no sign of life—which present-day John tells the reader is still the case. He imagines that the tornadoes are strewing ice-nine everywhere, destroying all life.
The reader thus becomes aware that the entire text is written in John’s post-apocalyptic days. The tornadoes would spread ice-nine to any body of water not connected to the great seas and oceans (e.g. lakes and reservoirs).
Themes
John looks in The Books of Bokonon for comfort. The first book implores the reader to close the book, as everything contained within is “foma” (lies). It retells the Bokonon story of creation, in which man asks God for the “purpose” of the world. God questions if there should be a purpose, to which man says “certainly.” God then tells man to think of one for himself.
Humankind’s purpose is its own to divine. Though the Bokononist scriptures often seem quite wise, they are built on their own profession of uncertainty and falsehood. Only lies can bring humans comfort, they seem to suggest.
Themes
John and Mona have separated beds; Mona is not interested in sex with John; present-day John implies that they did have sex, but that Mona was “repulsed.” Mona says that “it would be very sad to have a little baby now,” which John agrees with “murkily.”
Mona’s point is that it would be unfair to bring a baby into a world so full of devastation. John’s sexual desires seem absurd in this end-of-times scenario.
Themes
