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Chapter 10
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
The two people in the bar explain to John that Dr. Hoenikker was meant to give a commencement speech at their school. Dr. Asa Breed gave it instead, saying that “the trouble with the world was that people were still superstitious instead of scientific…if everybody would study science more, there wouldn’t be all the trouble there was.” Dr. Breed also said that one day science would “discover the basic secret of life”. The bartender heard recently that this was discovered recently, and that it was “something about protein.”
Dr. Breed is an advocate for the idea that scientific progress equates to the progress of civilization more generally. He does not entertain the idea that science has anything to do with the horrors of humankind. The “secret of life” here functions as a kind of dark joke—the answer is fundamentally underwhelming and of course doesn’t answer any of life’s deeper questions about the meaning of existence.
Themes
