This thesis explores the representation of desire in Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle within the psychoanalytic framework of Jacques Lacan. Drawing on Lacan’s theory of desire as a structural effect of lack, the study examines how human subjectivity is formed and destabilized through language, symbolic systems, and the presence of the Other. The research adopts a qualitative, descriptive–interpretive methodology based on thematic analysis, focusing on the novel’s characters, narrative strategies, and ideological structures. The study argues that Cat’s Cradle dramatizes desire not as a pursuit of fulfillment but as an endless process of deferral shaped by the Symbolic order. Characters’ engagements with science, religion, and political authority are interpreted as symbolic attempts to compensate for an irreducible lack at the core of subjectivity. Through Lacanian concepts such as the Real, the Imaginary, the Symbolic, the Big Other, and objet petit a, the study demonstrates that Vonnegut’s satire exposes the illusion of coherence offered by belief systems while simultaneously revealing their psychological necessity. Furthermore, the analysis shows that irony, fragmentation, and absurdity in the novel mirror the divided nature of the Lacanian subject, who is caught between the desire for meaning and the impossibility of achieving wholeness. By applying Lacanian psychoanalysis to Cat’s Cradle, this study fills a gap in existing scholarship and offers a new interpretive perspective that highlights the unconscious dynamics underlying Vonnegut’s critique of modern civilization. Ultimately, the thesis positions Cat’s Cradle as a literary exploration of desire, lack, and the instability of meaning in the postmodern condition.
