Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night is a novel that I considered to be very good, albeit extraordinarily difficult to get into. I was very familiar with the dark themes Vonnegut covers, but I was also used to how well he blends scathing humor into his novels, a sense of humor that I sorely missed for the first two-thirds of the book or so. The plot revolves around a Nazi war criminal who escaped facing the repercussions of his actions since he also served as a double agent for America (although, nobody knows this anymore), and groups of antisemites and communists in America that he interacts with. Imaginably, Vonnegut was dealing with a very sensitive topic here. Especially since the book is narrated from the perspective of the Nazi war criminal, who calls himself a “stateless man” with no allegiances to either Germany or America, blunting the blame he feels towards himself for his actions in a very detached, Camus’ The Stranger sort of way. Overall, this detached feeling towards the literal Holocaust did not sit very well with me in the beginning; however, by the end of the book my fears disappeared. Specifically at the scene where the narrator, Howard Campbell, runs into the old American spy who recruited him during World War II.

     When Campbell plays the card of being a “stateless man,” the American counters that had Germany won the war, he would be living as a Nazi hero right now and be feeling no guilt, like he does now, thus emphasizing how pointless Howard’s whole life has been in the grand scheme of things, and that he is fully guilty for his crimes. This somewhat breaks Howard, and sheds light on the importance of the book all at once. Vonnegut’s introduction directly states that the moral of the book is that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Howard was cosplaying as both a Nazi and American for so long and in such meaninglessness that he realizes that he has no purpose for being. All the world wants him dead as a Nazi war criminal, and seeing that he has no purpose, he goes to Israel to await trial and, in his own hopes, be hanged. 

     Mother Night also handles the issue of the insanity of dealing with World War II very well, as well as how hard it was to live in the state of the world post-WWII, from the sheer insanity of it. Overall, even though Mother Night was difficult to get into at first, I loved reading it by the end, and would highly recommend it! Besides, like all Vonnegut novels, it’s a breeze, and reads so easily, you almost feel guilty, like you’re reading pulp fiction. But indeed, Vonnegut’s a true master of great literature, and he just makes his books that enjoyable. What a legend!