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Chapter 118
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 rides a bicycle in the room that makes the fan move, while making up a tune to a verse by Bokonon that says, “we do, doodely do, doodely do, doodely, do / What we must, muddily must, muddily must, muddily must.” John mentions to Mona that humans breath in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, telling her that it is “science.”
Both Bokonon’s nonsense verse and John’s vain attempt to talk about science add to the absurdity of the situation. John talks about the basics of human life, highlighting that the humanity has been reduced to a state of “post-civilization.”
Themes
On the fourth day, John peeks out of the oubliette’s manhole and sees that the outside world has “somewhat stabilized,” but in a “wildly dynamic” way. The sky is still full of tornadoes, but they seem subdued.
There is a kind of reverse cosmogony at play—while, as the story goes, God created the world that man inhabits over the course of a week, man’s actions undo it all almost instantly. Vonnegut deliberately has John and Mona hide for a week to highlight this very point.
Themes
Three days later, with the tornadoes hanging high in the air but no longer posing a threat, John and Mona venture outside. Every step John takes makes “a gravelly squeak in blue-white frost.” John says to Mona that “death has never been quite so easy to come by”—all anyone would need to do is touch the floor and then touch their lips. Mona calls “Mother Earth” a bad mother. They search for other life, but find none.
The ground is infected with ice-nine everywhere that John and Mona step. Mother Earth, of course, has nothing to do with what’s happened. John and Mona are like an absurdist Adam and Eve, seemingly doomed to live in their grotesque paradise alone.
Themes
By the palace gate, John reads something that has been newly written on the wall in white paint, a quote from Bokonon: “someday, someday, this crazy world will have to end, / And our God will take things back that He to us did lend. / And if, on that sad day, you want to scold our God, / Why go right ahead and scold Him. He’ll just smile and nod.”
Bokonon portrays God, who he doesn’t believe in anyway, as a kind of morally ambivalent trickster. God, he reasons, doesn’t care what humans do with the world. The wider point is that, whatever Armageddon humans reap upon themselves, chances are that the world will go on after without us. Also, God taking no responsibility echoes the unwillingness of any of the book’s characters to take ownership of what has happened.
Themes
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