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
Miss Faust and John get into a lift back to the first floor. The lift is operated by Lyman Enders Knowles, described as “a small and ancient Negro” who is “insane.” Miss Faust finds Knowles’s seemingly incoherent talk, which ranges from Mayan architecture to mayonnaise, quite irritating.
Knowles acts as a kind of wise fool, seemingly speaking nonsense but with, on closer inspection, a degree of profundity. The juxtaposition of the Mayans with mayonnaise, apart from being a fun play on words, develops the sense that the novel takes a sweeping look at the entirety of the human story.
Themes
Knowles points out that “re-search means look again … Means they’re looking for something they found once and it got away somehow, and now they go to re-search for it!” He wonders, “who lost what?” Knowles says he knew Dr. Hoenikker, and that when he died he didn’t really die, but “entered a new dimension.”
Knowles asks a key question, wondering what it is that humanity is really searching for, particularly with science. If science doesn’t improve humanity’s own attitude towards itself and its planet, to what extent can it be said to represent “progress”? Knowles implies that humanity has lost something fundamental, gesturing both towards the biblical loss of innocence and the sense of loss felt after the use of the atom bomb.
Themes
