![]() ![]() That’s not to say that Mother Night is not distinctly Vonnegut in voice or subject matter. This novel also eschews the Science Fiction elements that appear in many of his books ( The Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse 5 or Timequake for instance), and has less of Vonnegut’s trademark humour. Vonnegut distances himself from the narrative in Mother Night with a new narrator and by positioning himself as the text’s ‘editor’, but Vonnegut’s interest in the war and the moral issues raised by those experiences are still evident in this novel. Slaughterhouse 5 was based around Vonnegut’s experiences during the bombing of Dresden, for instance, and Slapstick or Lonesome No More inserts members of his family prominently into the narrative. Mother Night at first appears less personal that some of Vonnegut’s other fiction. William O’Hare, the man who captured him in Germany before he was subsequently released (due to his ultra-secret role as a spy) is suddenly on his trail again, and it seems that his believed-to-be long-dead wife, Helga, may have also traced his whereabouts with the help of Jones and his unlikely cronies. An article about him appears in an extreme right-wing publication, The White Christian Minuteman, published by Dr Lionel Jones. Campbell has led an anonymous life in New York City, but now his past is about to catch up with him. The story itself takes place fifteen years after the war. Campbell recalls how he was asked to pretend to be a Nazi, how Goebbels himself commissioned a nationalistic play from Campbell and how Campbell also produced Nazi propaganda for radio which incorporated secret messages for the Allies. And with that typewriter Campbell documents how as a young American boy he arrived in Berlin with his parents and eventually became a playwright in the German language before being approached by Major Frank Wirtenan to be a spy. He has been given an old German typewriter by Tuvia Friedmann, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals, so that he might record his part in the war for the archives. Campbell Jr., sits in an Israeli prison in Jerusalem, arrested for war crimes against humanity, awaiting trial. World War II and Nazi Germany’s Final Solution is the background to Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night.
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