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Chapter 71
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 check out of Casa Mona, calling it “The Pissant Hilton.” John goes to his room, which overlooks the Bolivar harbor and the airport. The bed is unmade, and the room has no coat hangers or toilet paper.
The Crosbys hilarious nickname for Casa Mona implies an interesting point: hotel chains like Hilton try to create the same customer experience in whichever country they choose to venture into. In a way, they are trying to establish small pockets of American/Western sameness in deeply different locations around the world.
Themes
John goes to look for a maid. He opens a door and finds two people pressing their naked feet together. They are shocked to see him and beg him not to tell anyone—otherwise they’ll die on the hook. John explains from the present-day that he had just witnessed the Bokononist ritual, “boko-maru”—“the mingling of awareness.” He quotes one of the calypsos: “we will touch our feet, yes, yes for all we’re worth, and we will love each other, yes, yes, like we love our mother Earth.”
The two people John discovers are engaged in the same act as Mona was earlier. Boko-maru has an air of eroticism, but is also Vonnegut having fun with a pun on soul/sole. The “mingling of awareness” is a blackly comic comment on Vonnegut’s general suggestion that humankind is distinctly unaware of the perils of its own behavior.
Themes
