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Chapter 104
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
Having unthinkingly eaten some of the albatross, John searches for a bathroom, feeling sick. He bumps into Dr. Koenigswald, who seems very worried. He explains that “Papa” took whatever was in the cylinder necklace, and is now dead. He says it seems to have turned him into “cement.”
The reader knows by this point that “Papa’s” necklace contained ice-nine, and thus can sense the arrival of the ensuing catastrophe.
Themes
John goes to see the body of “Papa” Monzano, which is transfixed and stiff. His eyes are “glazed with a blue-white frost.” John, from the present-day, says that this “syndrome is no novelty now,” but it was then. “Papa” had taken ice-nine.
John’s interjection from the present-day clues the reader up on the terrible consequences to come from the release of ice-nine; it’s just a case of waiting to see how, not if, the disaster happens.
Themes
