"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

books:


	• Mother Night Kurt Vonnegut Dial Press Trade Paperback, 1999 - 288 pages average customer review:based on 99 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Great!

The book came in after just a few days and it was in great condition.

Not much has changed

MOTHER NIGHT was first published in 1961. It's amazing how little things have changed.

Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Vonnegut's major character, is an American who has lived in Germany since his father was transferred there when he was eleven. As an adult he is making a good living as a playwright when he is approached by a man named Frank Wirtanen who recruits him to spy for America. Wirtanen warns him that America will never admit they recruited him as a spy. Campbell becomes one of the most famous propagandists in the Nazi party, but during his broadcasts, his coughs and verbal pauses and other mannerisms send important messages to the Allies.

At the end of the war he is captured by Bernard B. O'Hare as a war criminal, but Wirtanen comes to his rescue and helps him escape to America where he is living in a run-down attic.

At the beginning of the novel Campbell is about to stand trial in Israel, having been outed by a Russian spy named Kraft-Potapov. Prior to his arrest, he is reunited with his wife Helga who he thought was dead. He is also celebrated by a collection of weird American neo-Nazis led by a crazy dentist named Lionel J.D. Jones, who thinks he can prove Jewish and negro inferiority using their teeth. Jones also publishes a newspaper called The White Christian Minuteman.

When Campbell's address is revealed in The White Christian Minuteman, all kinds of so-called patriots come looking for him, the foremost of whom is Bernard B. O'Hare, now a failed businessman who has devoted his life to the recapture of hero/war criminal Campbell.

Irony runs rampant. No one is who he/she seems to be. For me the climax of the book was when O'Hare confronts Campbell. Campbell says to O'Hare, "There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God almighty Himself hates with you, too. Where's evil? It's that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side."

Here we are in 2007, forty-six years later, and we've still got politicians and commentators reviling "evil-doers," and Swift boaters portraying silver star winners as unpatriotic. It seems like we should've learned something in all that time.

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"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

... With this simple thesis that Vonnegut lays out in the introduction to his stellar "Mother Night," we are entered into the morally complex world of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. You see, Campbell acted as a spy for the U.S. during WWII, but he was so deep under cover that even the American government has no evidence that he was actually working for them, that the broadcasts he was making on Nazi radio contained coded messages for American intelligence. There is only one man who can save Campbell from his trial, and he has no idea who he really is or how to contact him. Now, looking back on his life, Campbell begins to understand how morally suspect he is, no matter what his intentions were. In posing as a Nazi Campbell was party to some terrible atrocities that he, as well as the reader, must come to terms with and decide if he is a hero or just as bad as the villains he was ostensibly helping us fight. Is his plight tragic or deserved? Vonnegut, in top form, weaves together a compelling tale with his typical blend of dark humor and drama in what is, in my most humble opinion, his best novel ever -- and with a canon that includes "Slaughterhouse Five," "Breakfast of Champions," and "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," that is really saying something. An absolute must read.

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Post-Modern Morality Tale?

Vonnegut begins Mother Night with an introduction stating that this is the only story of his that he knows the moral, which happens to be: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." For an author whose novels often read like a Jacob's Ladder toy, amusing in their seeming lack of logic, it seems odd that he would write a novel with a clear and straightforward moral. However, what Vonnegut accomplishes in Mother Night is to rescue post-modernism from its more nihilistic tendencies, and makes it clear that our unreal selves can sometimes have real consequences.

Mother Night is apparently the diary of Howard W. Campbell Jr., written while he was awaiting a war crime trial in Israel. Of course Vonnegut is using the theme of a found text while claiming he only edited the manuscript. Much like the characters in his books, the authenticity of the novel itself is amorphous.

Through the course of the novel Campbell informs us that he was once a playwright turned Nazi propagandist who transmitted broadcasts espousing the Aryan philosophy across Europe. Similar to Reifenstahl's claims, Campbell states that his own politics are nonexistent, and that he was merely doing his job. In fact, he purposefully makes these broadcasts so over-the-top that no one could possibly see them as anything but ridiculous, but in a world where people like Hitler and Himmler somehow took over an entire country, Campbell's melodramatic broadcasts are viewed as genius. Soon he is contacted by an undercover U.S. agent who he affectionately calls his "Blue Fairy Godmother." This agent forcibly recruit's Campbell as a double agent, and using Campbell's broadcasts the Blue Fairy Godmother is able to transmit secret codes to the allied forces.

Vonnegut states in the book that the reason people are able to commit atrocities and still see themselves as a good person is the modern condition of schizophrenia. This leads to the question of whether or not Campbell is making up the Blue Fairy Godmother. Could the Blue Fairy Godmother be Campbell's own form of schizophrenia?

By the end of the book Campbell turns himself into the Israeli authorities so he can stand trial for war crimes. In a sense, it doesn't really matter whether or not Campbell was a double agent because his actions had very real and harmful consequences regardless. He stoked the coals of the Nazi propaganda machine, and regardless of whether he is guilty under the law, Vonnegut uses Campbell's own admission of guilt to show that he is morally guilty. Whether or not Campbell was a double agent he is guilty of pretending to be a Nazi sympathizer. For a post-modern novel this is a very hard edged morality tale. Oftentimes post-modernism is criticized for moral relativity (interestingly enough, those who I've heard use moral relativity the most are conservative historians who wish to defend historical figures who have done questionable acts, slavery being a prime example). What Vonnegut accomplishes in Mother Night is to make it clear that while the "self" is amorphous and changing, our actual actions have a clear impact on others and cannot be fortified from morality.

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Loss of dignity, identity and courage in the face of war

This may be one of the most difficult to read of Vonnegut's novels. The themes of absurdity and fatalism are presented in a dark manner. Although the narration itself flows easily like a natural conversation and Vonnegut presents his themes in no uncertain terms (pages 224-225, 251), the characters are difficult to warm up to because each is traced with evil. The protagonist, Howard W. Campbell, Jr, was a "beacon" for Nazi propaganda and associated with the most notorious of the Nazi anti-heroes. The story goes back and forth between skittish encounters and tragic events that depict the illusion of an individual's purpose on earth. Entertaining, enlightening, but heavy.

A key in interpreting this convoluted and dark novel is Vonnegut's dedication "to Mata Hari." Some brief research into the life of Mata Hari reveals some obvious parallels with the confessions of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. Mata Hari's haunting legacy is whether she was guilty of espionage or not. Mother Night starts with the same question regarding Campbell. Similar to Hari, Campbell had been generally viewed as an artist, a free-spirited bohemian prior to his war experience. Also, similar to Mata, Campbell's relationships and liaisons with powerful men took him across international borders frequently, which eventually would lead to his downfall.

In both cases, it is pointless to speculate whether or not Campbell or Hari were spies. Both were not only helpless in the face of the war machine ("gear teeth" in the "cuckoo clock of hell"), but also naïvely ignorant of the gravity of their respective situations after their arrests by the military. Hence the behaviors of both seem unfathomable, considering that each had actively determined the course of their life and constructed their own legendary persona, but also seemed pre-determined to be pawns in the immense storm of war.

Mother Night is a two-fold investigation of self-deception and fatalism. Fatalism seems to be a product of the funny mind games we play with ourselves when we rationalize that what we are doing not only right, but our only choice. Possibly, fatalism is a product of learned helplessness, where we no longer feel our actions can make a difference. Therefore, we tell ourselves lies to make our actions seem justified and we are lulled into inaction. In the end, the damage is done and the lesson is that our lies may be more influential than our truths.

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reviews: 1, 2, page 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12

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