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Chapter 4
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
In his reply letter to John, Newt says that John would do better to talk to his older siblings as they would remember more; he gives Angela’s address, but doesn’t know where Frank lives.
The banality of the exchange is in ironic contrast to the seriousness of the topic.
Themes
Newt explains that he was only six on the day the bomb was dropped. He was playing on the carpet when Dr. Hoenikker interrupted him to show him a cat’s cradle made from string. This string, continues Newt, had been wrapped around a book written by a prisoner about the end of the world in the year 2000.
The cat’s cradle is one of the oldest games in human history. It involves using the fingers to arrange string into different shapes, one of which is supposed to look like cat’s cradle. It stands as a symbol of human ingenuity and imagination, but also of a stark contrast between imagination and reality (which plays out in how humankind thinks of itself versus how it actually behaves).
Themes
The incident with the cat’s cradle was, according to Newt, the closest Dr. Hoenikker ever got to playing a game with his kids. He was once quote in Time magazine saying: “Why should I bother with made-up games when there are so many real ones going on?” Newt relays how his father’s behavior, instead of entertaining him, made him cry.
Dr. Hoenikker was a man who lacked the qualities often considered essential to being human: empathy and a sense of humor. The suggestion from his quote is that reality is a kind of game, and that his science was just a form of play. He thus considered his work as fundamentally amoral.
Themes
