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
John goes to see Newt, who is painting “a blasted landscape a quarter of a mile from the cave.” Newt asks John to drive him so that he can “forage for paints.” As they drive, they both agree that they have no “sex urge left.”
There is, essentially, no point in John or Newt reproducing—they are stranded, and the rest of the world is presumably destroyed. The idea of “foraging” for paints is an ironic mix of high culture and so-called primitivism.
Themes
John recalls something he once read about “aboriginal Tasmanians.” They were “encountered by white men” in the 17th century, who found them so “contemptible” that they hunted them “for sport.” The aborigines “found life so unattractive that they gave up reproducing.” John feels an affinity with that story. Newt observes that “all the excitement in bed had more to do with excited about keeping the human race going than anybody ever imagined.”
In fact, a big driver in the drop in aboriginal Tasmanian reproductivity was the introduction of Western diseases by the colonizers. Newt wonders if life is essentially meaningless, beyond the need for it to propagate.
Themes
Newt also points out that they don’t have any women “of breeding age among us,” describing Hazel as old “beyond having even a Mongolian idiot.” John quotes Bokonon about midgets: “midget, midget, midget, how he struts and winks, / For he knows a man’s as big as what he hopes and thinks!”
Bokonon’s quote sums up the idea that humankind has got ideas above its station. It thinks it can control the world, that it is rational, but neither proposition is true. It has inflated sense of purpose.
Themes
