Mother Night

Mother Night is a novel first published in 1961 and written by the American author Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Related Topics:
1961 - Kurt Vonnegut

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A paperback edition (ISBN 0385334141) is still in print as of 2004.

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It is the story of Howard W. Campbell Jr., a United States playwright who is living in Germany at the time of the Nazi seizure of power. Despite his political apathy, Campbell is recruited as an American agent. He spends World War II working as a radio propagandist for the Nazi regime and using his broadcasts to deliver coded messages (the contents of which he himself does not know) to the Allies. After the war, his work as a propagandist is largely forgotten and his work for the US remains secret; as such, he lives in isolation in New York City, until he surrenders voluntarily to Israel for trial. Throughout the book, Campbell grapples with the possibility that he was inadvertently more useful to the Nazis than to the US, and the fact that his brilliance as an Allied agent was not altogether a matter of idealism: "The real reason was that I was a ham ... I would fool everyone with my brilliant impersonation of a Nazi".

Related Topics:
United States - Germany - Nazi - World War II - New York City - Israel

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Vonnegut uses metafiction devices to blur the line between pretence and reality; for example, the book's dedication is to Mata Hari, and in the text we read that the dedication is Campbell's: "She whored in the interests of espionage, and so did I." Similarly, Vonnegut's introduction treats Campbell's memoir as a genuine historical document, and claims that certain chapters have been censored due to pornography or fears of libel.

Related Topics:
Metafiction - Mata Hari - Pornography - Libel

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One moral of this story, as pointed out by Vonnegut himself in the introduction, is also the source of his most famous quote: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Another is "Make love when you can. It's good for you."

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Howard W Campbell also appears briefly in Vonnegut's later novel Slaughterhouse-Five.

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