8/7/2023 0 Comments Mother night kurt vonnegut![]() ![]() ![]() For realsies, who are you? What makes you you? What is Mother Night About and Why Should I Care? ![]() But it also asks deeper questions about what makes us who we are, what makes us act the way we act, and what makes us justify things that shouldn't be justified.īut if that sounds too heavy, Shmoopers, don't fret. Mother Night looks at our most self-serving assumptions about war and reminds us that it's a bloody endeavor that has more to do with real-life horror stories than shiny banners and ticker tape parades. Vonnegut has a lot to say about pretending that war is the beautiful and noble thing it is in most propaganda. It turns out that you can't distort the truth without consequences. If you ask Vonnegut, this is some serious stuff: even though Campbell technically didn't mean any of the nasty things he wrote about Jews or the great things he wrote about Hitler, people still died because of it. And that's just as it should be, because the central figure is a secret agent propagandist whose job it is to distort the truth. (No one seems to know that he was only pretending to be a Nazi.) After that, he jumps all over the place, discussing his life in Germany during the war and then later in New York City, where he was essentially in hiding.Īll of this play with structure and chronology makes it difficult to ever really know for sure what's true and what's not in this novel. He starts in medias res in the early 1960s, from a prison cell in Israel, where he's about to be tried for his crimes. It's no surprise that he's an unreliable narrator, given the crazy life he's led. What we get in Mother Night is ostensibly Campbell's memoirs, written by himself. And not just any Nazi: Campbell pretended to be a defector from the U.S., and as a Nazi, he put his skills as a poet and playwright to use writing propaganda so incredibly atrocious-and by that we mean effective-that pretty much everyone was in awe of his work. This guy spent World War II spying for the United States…by pretending to be a Nazi. Campbell, Jr., as smarmy a narrator as you possibly could hope for. Our hammy, beleaguered guide to the goings-on in Mother Night is Howard W. What you're about to get in Mother Night, Vonnegut's dark postmodern tale from 1961, is a text full of Nazi jokes, dead people jokes, a wild and wacky cast of spies and war criminals, and a plot so twisted and mindboggling it'll make your head spin. Cards Against Humanity ain't got nothin' on Kurt Vonnegut. ![]()
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