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Chapter 40
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 takes a plane bound for San Lorenzo. On this, he meets the elderly Horlick Minton, the new American Ambassador for the island, and his wife, Claire. John describes them as “lovebirds.” Present-day John reasons that they were a “duprass”—a karass made of only two persons. He therefore excludes them from his own karass.
This plane journey continues the chain of astonishing coincidences throughout the novel, which Vonnegut does not attempt to make seem realistic.
Themes
John converses with Minton and Claire. Minton seems nonplused about becoming the new ambassador. Present-day John tells the reader that according to Bokonon members of a duprass usually die “within a week of each other.” When it came time for the Mintons to die, says John, “they did it within the same second.”
Whenever the end-of-times atmosphere seems to be diminishing, Vonnegut is sure to make John interject to remind the reader that disaster is looming. The characters of Minton and Claire are killed off, or revealed to be killed off later, almost immediately after the reader encounters them.
Themes
