Cat’s Cradle Symbol Analysis

The cat’s cradle is a complicated symbol that is clearly front and center to the novel, giving it its title. In a literal sense, a cat’s cradle is a game played with string in which each player must maneuver their fingers to create different images (one of which is the cat’s cradle). It is one of the oldest examples of human play and thus ties in with the idea that the book, though grounded in a specific historical moment, is principally concerned with the entirety of the human story. The cat’s cradle is, on the one hand, a representation of human ingenuity. One of the things that makes humans a remarkable creature is the capacity for play; the cat’s cradle takes skill and imagination, and it thus functions as an analogy for humankind’s increase in scientific understanding, experimentation leading to results, science as a kind of play.

Crucially, however, the cat’s cradle is also a representation of illusion. As Newt Hoenikker points out, the cat’s cradle created by the string isn’t actually a cat’s cradle—literally speaking, it’s just a gathering of string. The cat’s cradle thus also represents an emptiness at the heart of humanity: as Newt tells John, there is “no damn cat, no damn cradle.” The cat’s cradle is the first position of the string in the game, and so it’s prominent place in the story can also be taken as a suggestion that humanity is still in its first position too—that is, for all its delusion of progress, humanity is fundamentally the same as it ever was, and ever will be.