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Chapter 42
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
Hazel and Crosby talk glowingly about their imagined lives on San Lorenzo. Hazel is relieved “they all speak English and they’re all Christians,” and Crosby likes how the San Lorenzians deal with crime: “the hook.” He describes this as “a great big kind of iron fishhook” on which criminals are hanged.
Hazel has the pretense of being outward-looking and wanting to get to know other people, but she only wants to get to know people that fit in with her view of what constitutes a proper person. As with being a “Hoosier,” the English language and Christianity are strongly suggested to be “granfalloons” too. The hook is a comic nod to San Lorenzo’s apparent status as the “barracuda capital of the world.”
Themes
Hazel relates how she and Crosby once saw a similar torture implement when they were on holiday in London. They’d also seen an “iron chair a man had been roasted alive in,” for murdering his son. It turns, Hazel says, “he hadn’t murdered his son at all.”
Hazel’s casual talk about torture implements distracts from the terrible pain such instruments have inflicted on human beings. As the reader finds out later, the hook is actually based on the very same implement that Hazel is talking about. The story of the executed man, who was actually innocent, contributes to the building sense of misguided violence in the novel.
Themes
