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Chapter 26
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 and Miss Faust arrive on the sixth floor, the location of Dr. Hoenikker’s old lab. There is a plate commemorating him on the wall. The lab is just as Dr. Hoenikker left it. John notices a lot of “cheap toys lying around.” Miss Faust explains how many of his experiments were “performed with equipment that cost less than a dollar.”
The presence of the toys is a grotesque nod to childhood innocence, which is essentially what Dr. Breed claims of Dr. Hoenikker—that his work was a kind of play, free from moral constraints or implications.
Themes
Miss Faust calls Dr. Hoenikker an “unusual man.” “Maybe,” she hypothesizes, “in a million years everybody will be as smart as he was and see things the way he did. But, compared with the average person of today, he was as different as a man from Mars.”
Miss Faust’s comment acts as a counterpoint to the idea of the relentless march of human progress. The progress represented by Dr. Hoenikker—the atom bomb—is too far ahead of humanity’s ability to respond appropriately.
Themes
