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Chapter 23
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 introduces another Bokononist term: “wampeter.” No karass is without a wampeter, he says, “just as no wheel is without a hub.” The members of a karass “revolve” around their wampeter, “in the majestic chaos of a spiral of nebula.” Anything can be a wampeter—“a tree, a rock, an animal, an idea, a book, a melody, the Holy Grail”—and John believes ice-nine was the wampeter of his karass.
These interventions from a different time perspective create the sense of inevitability that the events in the book are propelled towards a destructive endpoint.
Themes
