Please feel free to respond to anything that particularly interested you in Mother Night. Here are some prompts to get you started thinking:
- If someone asked you to describe Vonnegut’s style, what would you say? How would you characterize it? (Your response will probably be more interesting if you can be as specific as possible–you could look at tone, diction, syntax, point-of-view, use of imagery or figurative language, paragraph or chapter construction, dialogue, presentation of character, etc.)
- Discuss the purpose and effect of the prefatory material to the novel–the author’s introduction added in 1966 and the “editor’s note.”
- Campbell tries to retreat with Helga into what he calls a “A Nation of Two,” and he writes plays that are “about as political as chocolate éclairs” (33). Is such a retreat possible? Does Vonnegut believe that one can have an apolitical art? What are we to think of the plays that Campbell produces?
- Discuss what you think the novel says about nationalism.
- What is Vonnegut’s view of the self? Is it possible to have a “good” self that no one else can see, what Campbell calls “the honest me I hid so deep inside” (39)?
- Discuss role-playing in the novel: Campbell plays the role of a Nazi; Resi plays Helga (who herself was an actress playing roles Campbell write for her); Potapov plays the role of Kraft, etc. Why all this performing? How does it compare to Hemingway’s depiction of identity performance in his novels?
- Do you think that Howard W. Campbell, Jr. is a reliable narrator of his own story?
Kurt Vonnegut struck me as a George Orwell with clever twists and dark humor. The behaviors of some of his characters reminded me of those in 1984 – behaviors that borderline between being farcical and existential, for which the author doesn’t offer much explanation. He just lays it out there for the readers to digest. Some of the dialogues in the book brings to mind Quinten Tarantino’s Inglorious Bastards, like the brilliant depictions of Nazi officers with an unnervingly personal spin.
I don’t fully see Howard Campbell as a reliable narrator, mainly because of his “A Nation of Two” theory. Kurt Campbell expresses through his character in the end that “to hate without reservation”, “to hate with God on your side” is where evil lies. In that line of argument, to love unconditionally draws equal scrutiny. But that is the kind of love Campbell relies on. The “Nation of Two” is a bizarre theory that has a delusional ring to it, and I take it as a defense mechanism Campbell developed for his own conscious. Resi Noth’s death is also hard to make sense of for me. It comes across more melodramatic, almost more comical than tragic. I’m not sure if Vonnegut’s intention is to mock at those who believes in medieval Romantism while living through modern hell.
His humor is so brilliant, and it puts me in constant awe of the complexity of human nature.
Before the narrative begins the novel speaks about nationalism. “Breathes there the man, with soul so dead/Who never to himself hath said/“This is my own, my native land!” In these first verses from Sir Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel, Canto VI [My Native Land], the speaker describes a man who resembles Howard Campbell Jr. in his lack of nationalism. While the poem itself goes on to criticize such a man, describing him as emotionally dead, I found it interesting that Vonnegut’s version in verse 6 ends not with an exclamation mark as in the original poem but with a question mark: “As home his footsteps he hath turn’d/From wandering on a foreign strand?”.
This could be my reading too much into a small detail, but I wondered if from the beginning Vonnegut is questioning the view of nationalism as heroic and romantic. Perhaps instead Vonnegut depicts nationalism as an ideology with the potential to foster ignorance and act as a distraction from emotional emptiness.
Howard Campbell Jr.’s satirical narration and dialogue certainly paints a negative picture of nationalism. For example, in the very first chapter Campbell relays a conversation he has in prison with his young Jewish guard, Arnold Marx. When Campbell reveals that he doesn’t know who Tiglath-pileser the Third is, Arnold gives him “a school-master’s frown” (4) and promises to bring him a book on the Assyrian conqueror later. Campbell replies in an unmistakably satirical tone that he’s too busy thinking about “remarkable Germans” like his “old boss, Paul Joseph Goebbels” (5). Shockingly, Arnold has no idea who Goebbels is, despite his infamous role as chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, hinting at a lack of knowledge of World War II and the Holocaust in general. While he prides himself on his knowledge of ancient history, Arnold is ignorant of the modern events surrounding the development of his nation. I viewed this example, as well as others involving ignorant youth in the novel, as a criticism of ignorance in regard to nationalism.
Another example that I found damning was Campbell’s conversation with Bernard O’Hare, the man who originally captured him in Ohrdruf in 1945. O’Hare seems to embody American nationalism with his membership in the American Legion and his need to hunt down Campbell for his war crimes. He even wears his American Legion uniform in his final confrontation with Campbell. Despite the grandiose and even romantic image painted in this final standoff, likened by Campbell to St. George and the dragon, it becomes clear that O’Hare clings to his nationalism because he has nothing else in life. “And then it hit me…why I was alive, and what the main thing was I was supposed to do” (248). At this point, life has not turned out to be the glorious story he imagined coming home to as a war hero. He is in a marriage that brings him misery and has gone through a number of unglamorous failed business ventures. The only thing he has left is his hatred for Campbell, which derives from his love of America and its perceived values which he fought for in World War II. Unfortunately for him, not only does Campbell beat him miserably but his hatred for Campbell is founded on lies created by the American government and spewed by Campbell. Ultimately, his nationalism does nothing more for him than fill an emotional void.
Circling back around to Vonnegut’s inclusion of Sir Walter Scott’s poem, then, it would seem to question who was really emotionally empty – the man without a nation (Campbell) or the man who has nothing but his nation (O’Hare).
I was deeply engaged with the subplot of Howard and Helga’s “Nation of Two” and their lives in theatre. The love Howard has for Helga seems to me the most concrete evidence we have of his “inner self” which is explicitly stated as unreliable (he blames many things on schizophrenia). His most focused moral compass returns to this idea of completion through the realms he occupied with Helga, though he never told her of his involvement with the US as a spy. It’s easy to forget that before his alleged recruitment to US intelligence, he was by all accounts very happy in his artist love bubble, that he enjoyed writing and it came to him easily, that his political opinions were vague and of less importance than his personal life and career, and that while living in New York he essentially stripped himself of all signifiers of his past life (including writing) except for his love-grief for Helga which sustained him. I think for him, love was apolitical. It was a neutral zone and although it delineates the apathy of his character for the war and injustices around him, there is also a very humanizing truth in that we fight for what we love and we realize pain most when we lose that. I think this is why the revelation of his work being plagiarized (particularly his diary of the sexual experiences he had with Helga) and put towards a political end rattles Howard as much as it does. He believed art could be apolitical, kept sacred and private even, but Vonnegut so easily flips the script. Possibly it is a reminder that nothing can be written in a vacuum — there is always an audience, and that audience is always changing. Our best intentions in art don’t always come through the work itself, and there is an eventual separation of the work from the artist.
I thought the role playing and the idea that you become who you pretend to be very interesting. It reminded me of how, in Mean Girls, Kady Heron eventually becomes the mean girl who she’s originally parodying. I also thought it was interesting that even though Campbell seems aware that his role-playing as a Nazi technically qualifies him as a Nazi, he still maintains that he didn’t really believe what Nazi’s believe. So on one hand he seems very aware of the role he is playing and how it changes him, but he also seems to suggest that the role mostly changes your exterior and you can remain the same on the inside. Helga’s role playing interested me too because it made me wonder if part of the reason that Campbell wrote these great romances for him and his wife to play in was to ensure that he was playing opposite of her because he knew that you are what you pretend to be and he didn’t want her to fall in love with someone else. I also thought it spoke volumes that Campbell seemed okay with letting Resi play the role of Helga. It suggests to me that Campbell probably viewed Helga as a character in one of his plays who could honestly be played by anyone as long as they were good enough actors. I feel like Campbell values the performance whereas Hemingway’s protagonists value authenticity and critique the performance. It’s like Campbell is saying: you are who you pretend to be and we are all pretending to be something, so you might as well play whatever role you choose well.
Elise,
I love a good Mean Girls reference.
You make some excellent points about role-playing. To me, Campbell seems so invested in maintaining his performance that he doesn’t appear to have any sense of his true self after all is said and done. When Campbell states that purgatory is worse than hell (ch.5), I got the feeling that he was already in a state of “purgatory,” doomed to wander on without an identity. Campbell no longer has a role to play and therefore no way of fitting into society.
I also like how you talked about Helga’s role-playing. I saw this parallel between their relationship in real life vs. how Campbell wrote about it in his play, and it made me wonder if their love was a performance in and of itself that gave him a role to play. In chapter 10, Campbell says, “If we had listened for more, had thought about what we heard, what a nauseated couple we would have been!” There’s an emphasis on how they don’t talk/listen to each other. The relationship relies heavily on physical interaction (perhaps partially why Campbell didn’t notice Resi was pretending to be Helga at first).
Lastly, I can’t help but think about Resi’s role-playing and how she seems to die consequentially. When she says, “I will show you a woman who dies for love” (ch. 39), she’s very wrapped up in the idea of death, almost as a dramatic ending of a play. It also interests me that she ends up facing a similar end as her sister, further solidifying her role.
I think the best way to describe Vonnegut’s style is absurdly human. This was my first foray into Vonnegut’s work and prior to starting the novel, I had an image of Vonnegut’s style in my mind that was radically different than what was on the page. I had heard that he was a post-modern genius whose work was absurd and groundbreaking. While I believe that statement is true, I think it’s kind of an understatement to the craftsmanship that he employs in the work. I believe many postmodern authors deprive themselves of some humanistic quality in their work as in their stories lack character depth and by a result lose something human in their stories. The same can not be said for Vonnegut. While his plotting, characters, and diction are all uniquely absurd in presentation, it is still very much driven by a humanistic quality. Even though Campbell as the narrator “time jumps” many times in the novel, each jump seems to flow perfectly into a form of stream of consciousness that feels incredibly realistic and human. This quality bleeds over into his characterization of many of the same characters especially Campbell, George Kraft, Resi, and Dr. Jones. Each character is absurd, but each one feels like they could be real life person (I especially felt this in the raid scene when Dr. Jones is talking to the Raid Boss). On top of the ridiculous nature of the novel, it is incredibly hilarious and employs dark comedy in a way that never seems mean-spirited and pessimistic. The darkly comedic aspect of the novel helps poke fun at these character’s flaws and the situations that they are put into as a result of themselves and the world at large and brings a much need levity to a novel that seems like it couldn’t be funny in the slightest based on the subject matter at hand.
I still remember the first time I read Kurt Vonnegut. I was a substitute teacher at a high school and I picked up Slaughterhouse-Five on a whim. I ended up finishing it before the last period of the day. It felt so fresh and new at the time. Vonnegut’s syntax and tone is always so relaxed and conversational. He uses humor in the same way someone would as they had a conversation over a few drinks after a long day at work. What I think is most interesting about his work is the amount of meta awareness he experiments with. This is especially true of Mother Night which deals with the recollections of Howard Campbell as he awaits trial in Israel for his role in the Nazi regime. The novel is framed by an introduction from Vonnegut who claims to be the editor of the text instead of its author. By taking the stance of an editor who is preparing to have the work published so a broader audience can read it, Vonnegut is calling attention to the fact that what we are reading is layered through a few different lenses. First, it is Campbell’s memories of the events which of course can only be trusted so much. And then, we have to remember that the memories we are reading have been “edited” by Vonnegut. I couldn’t help to wonder what else might have been left out or what might be getting brushed to the peripheral. Reading Mother Night is as much about what is not on the page as what is on the page.
I agree with Michael in arguing there are a few different lenses we have to consider when reading this story. Vonnegut attempts to remove himself by claiming to be an editor rather than writing this novel. It implies the story is true, but Vonnegut made a few stories along with it to adjust the narrator. With that said, it causes us to question if Campbell is a reliable narrator. While I reconcile with Campbell’s questions of morality and claiming he didn’t want to take responsibility for his role in what he did because he had negotiated his image to serve his country against the Nazis.
I think it’s really interesting to consider the character of Frank, the agent who told him what pauses to make during his shows. How does one’s public image relate to our internal image? Campbell almost sympathizes with his Nazi partners because he saw them as people too. I truly believe this is an attempt for Campbell to accept what he did. I don’t think he properly weighed out through the balance between being a co-conspirator of the Nazi party and working with the government to provide secret messages. The story that Campbell tells is one that causes the reader to question his motifs and the overall truth that the reader receives since Cambell is biased.
Role-play is integral to Mother Night as no character (perhaps no one besides Dr. Jones and his merry band of white supremacists) fully participates as themselves. Hemingway’s interest in authenticity as we previously discussed is warped in Night because Vonnegut seems to buck at the notion of finding authenticity. When everyone plays a role, the characters are split; we have to read these two parts of each persona–Campbell as Nazi and as American spy, Resi as herself and the character of Helga, Kraft as Campbell’s friend and as Russian spy Potapov–because they are often contradicting characters themselves. If Hemingway searches for a source of authenticity, Vonnegut questions if authenticity is even achievable. In doing my research for my critical reception research, I found an interesting article on existentialism that made an intriguing point on authenticity. The writer Robert Tally says of the craving for authenticity:
In demonizing the inauthentic or fake, and in fetishizing a largely imaginary “real” or authentic experience, such thinkers inevitably— and, in Heidegger’s case, wholeheartedly— embraced a logic of exclusion that underwrites some rather appalling behaviors. In Germany, as in the United States and elsewhere, authentic experience became tied to the rustic, the rural, the soil, the homeland; it was opposed to both the “foreign,” which by definition must appear inauthentic, and the “modern,” which by some definitions subverts the traditional (and, hence, more authentic) order. The jargon of authenticity, with its romanticizing of the “homeland,” carried with it the discernible stench of fascism. (42)
Tally’s point suggests that idolizing authenticity inevitably leads to destruction since it praises something pure and suggests the inauthentic or the fake is lacking. The pretending done in Mother Night questions whether one can even truly pretend. Accepting a role, even one contradicting your own personal ideals, exposes a different face. I kept reading this novel thinking of the cliche: “You are who you truly are when no one is around.” But reading this novel inherently contradicts that sentiment. If we read Campbell’s account as true (if that is even possible), only three people were exposed to his acts as an American spy. His own wife only knew him as a Nazi broadcaster. To the world and everyone who knew him well Campbell was never an American spy. The moral of Mother Night, “We are who we pretend to be,” suggests the way we are known to others, the roles we play, and our influence on the world represents our character more accurately than when we are alone.
Moral of the story:
– We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.
– When you’re dead you’re dead
– Make love when you can. It’s good for you.
I am most intrigued by the declaration of: “When you’re dead you’re dead,” which, I believe, is inextricably bound with the moral of love. The beauty of Vonnegut’s rhetoric can be traced through Howard’s closing thoughts of the final pages. The first person narrative becomes objective when Howard declares: “I think that tonight is the night I will hang Howard W. Campbell, Jr., for crimes against himself” (268). The separation of self points to the finality of Howard’s actions and allows Howard to become his own judge, jury, and executioner. Once he is declared a free man, he comes to the realization that he can no longer be a free man, which perhaps ties back to the concept of curiosity providing motivation for the character. Prior to Resi’s suicide, she apologizes that she has nothing to live for and only has love for Howard who “is so used up that he can’t love any more. There is nothing left of him but curiosity and a pair of eyes” (230). As Howard continues to lose his curiosity, his ability to move on and to continue living declines. Thus, the final lines of the novel are: “Goodbye, cruel world!” “Auf wiedersehen?” which translates to, “Goodbye?” (268). The rhetoric of the final line being delivered as a question leaves the reader to consider the true finality of Howard’s actions and words. This, in my mind, ties to Vonnegut’s exploration of the truth and manipulation of memory, which directly ties to romantic and intimate physical connection (one of the morals of the story). Early in the novel, Howard expresses that his “most cherished memories [of Helga] have now been converted into catfood, glue, and liverwurst,” because Resi made him “faithless to those memories, and they can never be the same again” (206). This manipulation of memory and history continues in the closing pages as the reader is left to question if the end of the novel, or Howard’s suicide, is truly goodbye for the protagonist.
Howard Campbell definitely considers himself a reliable narrator (don’t they all?), but the reader is not so sure. Howard claims that what makes him different from real traitors is that he never once believed the lies himself. However, just because he doesn’t believe the lies does not mean he doesn’t tell him in his narration. The best reason he had for going into spying was that “he was a ham. As a spy of the sort he described, [Howard] would have an opportunity or some pretty grand acting. [He] would fool everyone with [his] brilliant interpretation of a Nazi, inside and out” (39). This level of method acting could potentially even fool himself into thinking he is a reliable narrator.
Howard says, “I’ve always known what I did. I’ve always been able to live with what I did. How? Through that simple and widespread boon to modern mankind– schizophrenia” (179). At the same time Howard asserts his reliability, he indicates he might not be able to be as reliable a narrator as he thinks he is.
To me, the biggest point in favor of Howard’s reliability is the proof that his fairy godmother, Wirtanen, does exist (267). Unfortunately, Howard’s mental health is in a state where he does not use this proof to save his life.
Mike makes a good point about Howard’s memories being self-edited. Plus, Howard has a team of researchers. Maybe they revised, added, and deleted further. Of course, this wouldn’t affect Howard’s personal reliability since that is not in his control.
I found the concept of nationalism as a poignant theme that imbued the text throughout the novel. The different elements of nationalism present within the text often evoked other familiar, yet typically thought of as separate, westernized conceptions and ideologies. Lines delineating patriotism from that of nationalism, fascism, xenophobia, and so forth are blurred to the point of almost erasure. I appreciated Vonnegut’s straight-forward logic utilized by the various characters (most notably, in Howard Campbell’s character) in challenging these ideologies. Through the ways in which these characters perceive and maneuver language(s), the veracity and efficacy of language itself is challenged, illustrating it as a tool of both conformity and contention.
Vonnegut’s view of the self, I believe, is an ability, to be honest with yourself and who you really are or want to be. In the book, Mother Night, all the characters seem to be posing as one person or another. They lived double lives, had multiple identities, and some had to live in hiding and create spaces where they can be whoever they desired to be.
Howard Campbell was posing as a German Nazi while being an American spy. I felt he had no allegiance to Germany and was too willing to work for the Americans. I believe he was so aware of his situation and circumstances; he had an innate ability to separate the two people he became. He knew he was betraying Germany and he never considered the circumstances or if he did, he was able to master the art of not caring.
I believe there is a “good” self no one else can see or at least a self that you keep for yourself away from others. In Campbell’s case, he was pretending to be a Nazi and he was spying for the American government. He had to keep his true self hidden to remain undercover. It was essential to his livelihood to keep up the façade. Even when he went to visit his father-in-law, he wore the uniform of a Nazi so he wouldn’t receive any resistance between towns.
I believe it is important to keep the true part of yourself hidden. You can only trust so many people with your true self and even those people you choose to let close to you can deceive you. We see that in Remi, a.k.a. Helga #2, and his new best friend the painter. They both end up being Russian spy’s setting him up to be arrested in Mexico. I believe everyone has a good person inside of them and they may not let that person be seen because of the ideologies of their associates, friends, or family. You never know who you can trust. It is always good, to be honest with yourself though. Some of us must wear different faces all day long. But when you go home at night, try to be yourself.