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Chapter 119
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 recalls an advertisement for “a set of children’s books called The Book of Knowledge.” In this, a child asks his father why the sky is blue, with the ad suggesting that the answers can be found in the product. John thinks that, if he was with “a daddy,” he would have many questions in his current situation, e.g. “why are all the trees broken? ... what makes the sky so sick and wormy?” John realizes he is “better qualified” than anyone else to answer such questions, if anyone else is even alive.
This ties in with the idea of humanity as child-like, in the sense that it has not yet grown up. The book mentioned was a real encyclopedia for children published between 1912 and 1965. Its mention is intended to highlight that, for all humankind’s advances in knowledge, in other ways it is as violent and brutish as ever.
Themes
As John and Mona walk, John wonders where they’ll find the dead. He has a resurgent feeling of wanting to climb Mount McCabe. Then they come across a “natural bowl” in the land, in which “thousands and thousands” of people lie dead. Their lips are frosted with ice-nine. John reasons that they must have taken shelter there, before opting to poison themselves. Many of them appear to have died during boko-maru.
The anonymity of the dead is hauntingly reminiscent of civilian casualties caught up in war. There is something indiscriminate about the way they are piled up together, perhaps reminding the reader of the Holocaust. Their religion, built entirely on lies, seems to have been their last comfort.
Themes
By the dead, there is a note signed by Bokonon. It says that the people in the bowl survived the “freezing of the sea,” and made “a captive of the spurious holy man named Bokonon.” They had demanded guidance from him; he had advised that God was trying to kill them, and that they “should have the good manners to die”—which they did.
Bokonon took his absurdism to its extreme limit, by interpreting the storms as a sign from God (in whom he does not believe). He seems to have a dastardly taste for the increase of his myth, which this neatly fits into.
Themes
