Mother Night

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

The quote above says it all as far as the theme of this story. The events center around WWII but I think the idea could work in any time period. What strikes most about this book is the idea that we all fool ourselves into believing we're heroes in our own story.

As the main character and narrator of this story, Campbell doesn't do that. An American spy/Nazi propaganda writer, he knows he's done both good things and bad things and he can hold the contradiction in his mind. (He can't actually live with it, but that's a different problem.) This is in defiance of the other characters in the story who eliminate the thoughts from their mind that don't fit in with their goals, their life philosophy.

There is for example, O'Hare, the former soldier who captured “war criminal” Campbell the first time and who thinks all the troubles in his life will be solved if he just captures him again. There is also the white supremacist dentist, Jones, who truly believes in his hateful cause. Not coincidentally, Campbell thinks of this kind of “totalitarian madness” as tearing a tooth out of your head. The missing teeth “are simple, obvious truths, truths available and comprehensible even to ten-year-olds, in most cases.”

I enjoy Vonnegut's writing style. He has a dry sense of humor, the story moves along nicely, he doesn't overwrite, and yet the characters and scenes are vivid. The dialogue is entertaining and believable. The themes of the story are heavy and even dark, but Vonnegut tackles them with a clear and direct writing style.