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Chapter 41
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 goes for a drink in the plane’s small saloon bar. Here he meets H. Lowe Crosby, an American entrepreneur, and his wife, Hazel. Crosby explains that he is planning on moving his bicycle-manufacturing business to San Lorenzo. He hates what America has become: “It’s all human relations now. The eggheads sit around trying to figure out new ways for everybody to be happy. Nobody can get fired, no matter what.”
Crosby is a representative of brute business, sniffing out where the money can be made and caring little for the conditions of his potential workers. He is a grotesque embodiment of American ideals: the free market, individualism and patriotism.
Themes
Crosby tells John he thinks San Lorenzo will be better for his business, as the “people down there are poor enough and scared enough and ignorant enough to have some common sense!” John and Hazel discuss how they are both “Hoosiers.” She tells him to call him “Mom.” Present-day John introduces the Bokononist term, “granfalloon”—“a false karass, of a seeming team that was meaningless in terms of the was God gets thing done.”
Hazel is meant to represent the idiocy of “granfalloons”— people who feel an affinity with one another based on some kind of false (according to Bokonon) division, e.g. nation states. She is the epitome of superficial civility, but deep down is only interested in getting to know people who are as much like her as possible.
Themes
