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Chapter 113
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 back up to the top of the castle and looks out over the ceremony guests and the scenery. He tells Frank to tell Minton to deliver his speech. Minton decides not to follow his planned speech, but to “do a very un-ambassadorial thing” and speak about how he really feels.
Minton is supposed to through the motions expected of him but has other ideas (unwittingly appropriate to what’s going on unbeknownst to him). Or, perhaps, this is the way he always delivers similar speeches—Vonnegut provides no heroes or feel-good messages.
Themes
Minton calls those that have lost their lives in war “children,” not men—because he himself lost his own son in World War Two (the same war). He says his “soul insists that I mourn not a man but a child.” They do die “like men,” he continues, which makes possible “the manly jubilation of patriotic holidays.”
Minton echoes the thoughts of John in the previous chapter—that, if humanity itself were a human being, it would still be a child. This speech has gravitas and profundity, but these qualities can never be fully trusted in the novel.
Themes
Minton says that the best way they can all honor the war dead is by spending the day thinking about what killed them: “the stupidity and viciousness of all mankind.” Perhaps they should all “go on all fours all day long and grunt like pigs,” because his would be a better tribute than flags and military demonstrations.
Minton says that a military show is only a fitting tribute if everyone is “working consciously and tirelessly to reduce the stupidity and viciousness of ourselves and all mankind.” He recites a poem which includes the lines: “When I felt the bullet enter my heart / I wished I had staid at home and gone to jail … Instead of running away and joining the army.”
This is a poem (by Edgar Lee Masters) that strikes at the heart of patriotism and nationalism, wondering, as many did after the world wars, what it means to die for a country. Minton’s speech is fairly in line with the overall thrust of the book: that humankind is stupid and vicious.
Themes
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Minton asks what it means to die “for one’s country … any country at all.” He says people shouldn’t think about countries, but “peace … brotherly love … plenty.” If man were “kind and wise,” the world would be a “paradise.” As a representative “of the peace-loving people of the United States,” he says that he honors San Lorenzo’s war dead, and casts a wreath into the sea. The six military planes head toward the gathering.
Minton’s words seem so simple, and yet so impossible to enact. Kindness and wisdom would equate to peace, he seems to say—but nothing in the book suggests that this can happen. The military planes’ approach signals the arrival of the book’s apocalypse.
Themes
