Book Review

Hocus Pocus

by Kurt Vonnegut

     I hate to say anything bad about a Kurt Vonnegut novel but Hocus Pocus was not one of his best. The narrative is written in the non-linear style that has become a Vonnegut trademark. The main character, Eugene Debs Hartke, is a typical Vonnegut protagonist too. The story also fits in neatly with the kind of satirical poke at modern society that you would expect. Overall though, the novel suffers because the actual theme of the book is unclear.

Eugene Debs Hartke, like so many other characters created by this author, is a mediocrity with some ironic eccentricities. As a teenager, he gets humiliated when his father, employed as an engineer, does his science fair project and tries to trick everybody into thinking it was the work of young Eugene. The boy later goes on to a military academy and gets shipped off to duty as a mid-level commanding officer in the Vietnam War. When he returns he becomes a professor of physics and music appreciation at a college that caters to children with learning disabilities who come from wealthy families. Located on one of the Finger Lakes south of Rochester, New York (my hometown), the college sits on the shore opposite a prison. As the story goes, Hartke gets fired from his job and goes to work as a teacher in the prison. But one night there is a jailbreak, and a gang of prisoners escape and take over the college during the winter break between semesters. Hartke, sympathetic to the prisoners who he teaches, joins them and tries to act as a negotiator between them and the authorities. But the result is that Hartke gets arrested for assisting them instead.

As a character study, the portrayal of Eugene Debs Hartke has some strengths and weaknesses. He is written about with irony and humor, some of which really delivers, while he tries to navigate a world where circumstances are never in his favor and mostly beyond his control, the quintessential existentialist non-hero. He is halfway in between a bumbling mediocrity and a man destined for greatness. On one hand, he becomes famous in Vietnam for giving powerful pep talks while on the other hand he realizes the pointlessness of the whole war. His speeches are nonsense but they fool people into not giving up. He appears to be destined for an important role in activism and reform, hence his name being that of the historical socialist labor union leader, but his attempts at being a Vietnam War critic and being an effective leader in the prison only bring him failure and humiliation. He later gets fired by the conservative, right wing board of directors at the university for his comments which get recorded by a student with a hidden tape recorder. Hartke is also a chronic womanizer, keeping a list of all the women he has slept with along side a list of all the people he killed, directly or indirectly, as a member of the US military. This contrasts with his benevolent role as a husband who takes care of his wife and her mother, both of them living in his house and both of them suffering from mental illness.

Some of the novel suffers from lack of detail. We learn that his wife and her mother are mentally ill but we never learn what their mental illness is. Hartke also never reconciles the conflicting thoughts he has about the prisoners; he sympathizes with them, trying to be their educator and mentor, but he also points out that they are guilty of terrible crimes like murder and rape. He never does any authentic soul searching to reconcile this conflict. He feels sorry for them simply because they are prisoners and mostly non-white. The motivation behind his thinking never gets clarified.

The theme of parallels is also not fully examined. One parallel is the two worlds of the university and the prison. This contrasts a world of freedom with a world of restraint, but the purpose of the contrast is not explicitly spelled out. You might deduce that the university is more like a prison since Hartke is not able to express his freedom to critique America there, and the prison is more like a university since that is where he finds the most success and personal satisfaction as a teacher. Another parallel is the list of people Hartke killed and the women he has slept with. Neither accomplishment is anything admirable. He feels ashamed for having killed people in Vietnam and, even worse, American society hated him for it when he returned. Then he loses his job for speaking out against the war. As a chronic womanizer, he also sees how he has become more well-known on campus for his promiscuity and his reputation has suffered because of the women he has hurt with his insensitivity. Having seduced the university president’s wife, he also suffers because this is used as another reason for him to be fired. But none of this is directly stated and it may not have even been the author’s intended purpose in writing about them.

Then there is all the other “stuff” in the book. I put the word “stuff” in quotation marks because a lot of it just seems like extra, arbitrary, generic add-ons that don’t contribute anything useful or necessary to the overall narrative. There are things like a Mercedes that Hartke received as a gift from a student and one he rarely drives because it keeps getting vandalized, a woman’s disastrous art show in Buffalo, a computer that can predict the course of people’s lives based on their current circumstances, a skull found buried on campus, and even the Tralfamadorians put in an appearance. They show up in a science-fiction story published in a porn magazine which explains that they have chosen humans as vectors to spread germs throughout the universe. As usual, Vonnegut reminds us that, if there is any purpose to human existence, it is something so mundane, so not obvious, and so meaningless to us that we can never comprehend it. But why are these things even in the story? They seem like extraneous information and it even appears that Vonnegut himself could never be satisfied with his own work unless he mentions the Tralfamadorians whether doing so made sense or not.

Even more to the author’s discredit is the complete lack of emotional affect that characterizes Eugene Debs Hartke. Despite everything that happens to him, he proceeds throughout most of the novel without showing any signs of pain, frustration, anger, joy, confusion, pride, or anything thing else that an ordinary person might feel throughout the course of their lives. Then again, writing characters that had emotional depth was never a strong point of Vonnegut’s to begin with, despite any other legitimate claims to genius he might otherwise have.

Aside from being a flawed character study of Eugene Debs Hartke, I think Vonnegut’s intentions in this novel are to, first, write a zeitgeist piece about the apocalyptic end of the 20^th century, and second, to show how language can be deceptive. In the former case, the novel is fairly successful. Japanese businessmen have bought out most American corporations including the for-profit prison across from the university. The economy is in ruins. The fuel supply is dwindling. The environment is destroyed. Racism and social injustice have become predominant to the point where nothing really matters anymore. This theme is not entirely successful though because the author tries to comment on too much. It reads like he had a checklist of things rhat have gone wrong and he was sure to check every box as he wrote regardless of how well the criticisms fit into the narrative. But at least the book has a left wing political bent as it should while simultaneously showing the ineffectiveness of liberal politics in a society full of stupid conservative people. The latter theme of language was not given enough attention to fully work. The title specifically refers to the meeting that Hartke has with the college board in which they give reasons for his dismissal. The reasons they give are nothing more than a smokescreen, just some hocus pocus to distract him from the real reasons they have for terminating his professorship. Also the speeches Hartke gives in Vietnam are nothing but hocus pocus, sleight if mind designed to distract the soldiers from thinking about the absurdity of the war. Hartke also uses lies and deception to seduce women, promising the president’s wife a trip to Venice to get her into bed. Vonnegut is telling us that society is nothing but bullshit since truth and honesty get nothing accomplished while deceit leads to results every time. He doesn’t develop this theme to completion, though, so it winds up being an obscure point.

It is easy for the main ideas to become obscure in Hocus Pocus. Kurt Vonnegut bombards us with so much information it is hard to pick out what he intends to say or at least what he is prioritizing. This approach works well with maximalist novelists like Joyce and Pynchon, but in this case Vonnegut’s end of-career novel comes off as bloated, overbearing, and without any definite direction. There are just too many threads and most of them are loose. Or is that the intention? This is a work of postmodernism so all I can say is maybe. In any case, it is far from Kurt Vonnegut’s best work. It isn’t a terrible book either; I just don’t think it is worth reading more than once. By the time he wrote this, he had already earned his stature as one of America’s greatest writers so it probably doesn’t matter much anyways. 

 

Book Review

The Sirens of Titans

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. 

     What is the meaning of life? How is it possible that the richest man in America could be so unhappy? These two questions sound like the kind of trite cliches that serve as fodder for predictable Hollywood movies and cheesy novels on the bestseller list. But when taken on by Kurt Vonnegut Jr., in the earliest phase of his writing career, they get treated with a unique twist that only this singular author could pull off. The Sirens of Titan has earned its reputation as one of Vonnegut’s best and as an American classic as well.

It tells the story of Malachi Constant , whose name changes throughout the novel to mark different stages in his growth as a human being. He inherits a fortune from his father, who he never knew, and lives a meaningless life of debauchery, getting whatever he wants, and never achieving any sense of purpose. But we’ll come back to him later.

There is another important character who goes by the name of Rumfoord. He also is rich and lives in a mansion with his uptight wife Beatrice who thinks that other people are nothing more than pollution. She has preserved her virginity all throughout their marriage. Rumfoord doesn’t actually live in the mansion though. He lives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, and he travels through time and space with his dog, making occasional appearances on Earth that attract massive crowds of people who look to him to explain the meaning of life. Rumfoord can see the future and make things happen as he pleases. His purpose in the world is to start a new religion unlike the ones that already exist in that this new one will unite all of humanity rather than dividing us all, causing us to fight with each other interminably. His function in the narrative is to act as both chorus and deus ex machina. You could say he is Vonnegut’s doppleganger since the author of a novel is the god and creator of the world inside his writing. But Rumfoord clearly explains that he is not God even though he has godlike powers.

So getting back to Malachi Constant...Rumfoord arranges to meet with him and tell him about his future. Constant is to travel into outer space where he will impregnate Rumfoord’s wife Beatrice. Riffing off of Oedipus Rex, Malachi and Beatrice do everything they can to prevent this from happening and yet it happens on a flying saucer that is taking them to Mars.

Vonnegut’s mastery of writing technique is on display here in the way the narrative shifts to Mars. And this is Mars the planet, not Mars, Pennsylvania. Yes there really is a town called Mars in Pennsylvania (and if you think that’s crazy, there is also a town called Bucksnort in Tennessee, a town called Truth or Consequences in New Mexico, and a city called Batman in eastern Turkey). Vonnegut creates a dramatic contrast in time, space, and narrative structure with these dramatic disjunctions of location and the accompanying dissociative fugue suffered by his characters. This technique has come to be a characteristic of postmodernist fiction, but something tells me Vonnegut cared little for that kind of labeling. The section about Mars starts with an army private named Unk who has been brainwashed so that he can remember nothing of his past. Unk, along with all the other soldiers, has electrodes placed under their scalps and are remote controlled by commanding officers to obey orders or else suffer excruciating pain. Unk, along with everyone else in the army, had formerly been a disgruntled Earthling who got recruited to Mars where Rumfoord builds an army. His plan is to invade Earth. Unk’s memory starts to return and he finds a letter he wrote to himself before they performed the brainwashing surgery. The letter tells him he has a wife and son on Mars and his duty is to rescue them so they can return to Earth and live as a family. But when he finds them them, Unk ;earns they have no interest in him or his plans. Here we learn that Unk is actually Malachi Constant after having his memory erased and his wife is Beatrice. Just like Oedipus and his mother Jocasta, Malachi and Beatrice can not escape their fate and their son Chrono is the result.

What can be gathered from this section is that, first, Vonnegut is critiquing the military. After being traumatized by his experiences in World War II, Vonnegut took every opportunity he could to remind us all that wars should never be fought. By constructing an army on Mars of brainwashed men without memory, unable to think, and capable of nothing but obeying orders, most specifically orders to kill without conscience, Vonnegut reminds us of the inhumanity of the military. It turns men into machines. At the same time, the contrast between Malachi and his Martian identity as Unk shows that he is developing as a human being. The pain he feels when he tries to disobey orders shows that he is becoming self-aware in ways that he wasn’t when living on Earth where he lived without effort or self-consciousness. Furthermore, when he found his letter and realized he had a family on Mars, his impulse was to rescue them; this contrasts sharply with the hedonistic and selfish Malachi who cared about nothing but promiscuity before coming to Mars.

The third stage in Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he returns to Earth and meets up with Beatrice and Chrono at the mansion owned by Rumfoord. The space-travelling millionaire had organized the army on Mars to attack Earth and lose the war. By doing so, the entire human race had to stop fighting with each other and unite in order to defeat the alien invaders. Vonnegut knew that humans achieve strength in unity mostly when they have a common enemy. In ordinary circumstances that common enemy is other people, but Vonnegut via Rumfoord depicts the benefit of having the entire planet fighting a common enemy and so the Martian invasion becomes a necessity. You would think the climate crisis would be enough of a threat to unite us in this way, but I guess we are too dumb to see that. Rumfoord uses the opportunity to start a new religion in which all humans cooperate, living in harmony and peace. This is one of three passages where Vonnegut explains his concept of what life is meant to be about.

Malachi Constant, otherwise known as Unk, receives yet another name when he arrives in a flying saucer. He is dubbed the Space Wanderer and he emerges from his spaceship in Maine with a beard and long hair, a bit Christ-like you might suppose. The satire of Jesus Christ does not end there. As the central figure of this new religion, plastic trinkets of the Space Wanderer hanging dead with a noose around his neck are commonplace among followers of this new religion. This is an obvious jab at the prevalence of the cross and Jesus crucified on it found in so many Christian homes and on so many t-shirts and necklaces worn by the Christian faithful. There is something perverse and sickly about the Christian fascination for the gory torture of their savior as if they take sadistic delight in seeing their messiah suffering in maximum pain.

When the Space Wanderer meets up with Beatrice and Chrono on a scaffolding on the walls of Rumfoord’s estate, Rumfoord climbs up into a tree and addresses them through a loudspeaker as if speaking with the voice of God coming out of the sky. But he isn’t God, he is just a man in a tree with a microphone. Anyhow, he confronts the family with their dilemma by asking if any of them have ever done anything that wasn’t entirely selfish. Being unable to answer the question, they board another flying saucer and take off again for outer space. The irony is that the Space Wanderer as Unk and Malachi Constant did do things that were beneficial to other people, trying to rescue his family from Mars for instance. He just lacked the self-awareness to realize he had done so. This passage represents the awakening of his morality and takes him further down the path to self-consciousness that will later distinguish him as a fully realized human being who understands the meaning of life.

The final stage of Malachi Constant’s growth comes when he arrives on Titan, one of Saturn’s moons, to find Salo, the companion robot to Rumfoord who lives there in a palace before he dies. Salo, being a robot who developed human emotions, has dedicated his life to serving Rumfoord but disassembls himself when Rumfoord sinks into a depression and tells him to leave. Rumfoord learns that he wasn’t the master of Earth at all and is, in fact, being used by forces in the universe he can never comprehend. His purpose, and the purpose of the human race is entirely mundane and everything we think we know through religion and philosophy is nothing but wrong-headed delusions of grandeur. But Malachi arrives with Beatrice and Chrono and since they are the only people on the moon, they are forced to take care of each other. Chrono disappears into the woods to live with a flock of birds and the two remaining people find happiness by taking care of each other. They learn that the ultimate purpose in life is to take care of the people around you. The ending of this novel is beautiful in ways that can’t easily be expressed in this review.

As mentioned before, Vonnegut gives three scenarios in which he depicts life as it should be. One, as already stated, is the religious gathering that happens after the Earth is invaded and the human race unites to win the war. Another instance is where Chrono, after abandoning his parents on Titan, goes to live with the birds in the forest; he becomes like the birds by learning to fly and transcends his own humanity by becoming a part of nature. The third instance is when Unk and Boaz’s spaceship gets redirected on its way to Earth and lands in a cavern on Mercury. Boaz is an African-American and the commanding officer of Unk. In the cave, he renounces his position as Unk’s superior and finds a species of creatures called harmoniums that nourish themselves with vibrations (there was a Canadian progressive rock band named after these creatures so check them out if you are so musically inclined). When Boaz plays music for them, they gather around him and he falls in love with them. Being an African-American orphan, he finds his peace in life by playing music for creatures that honor him with admiration. He also realized his responsibility to them when he finds they die if they get too close to his cassette player which is the source of his music. With love comes responsibility. This book was written when the Civil Rights Movement was gaining momentum and I’m sure that had something to do with his portrayal of the music-appreciating Boaz who wanted peace more than war. Notice how the people who find happiness in this story all have to leave Earth to achieve it.

Something should be said about the title too. In the narrative, the Sirens of Titan make only infrequent appearances. Rumfoord shows a picture of them to Malachi Constant in order to lure him to Mars with the possibility that he might get to sleep with them since they are more beautiful than any Earth women he has ever seen. After receiving this picture, it begins showing up in advertisements for cigarettes. I believe Vonnegut is commenting on the use of sex in advertising. The Sirens are used as a lure for Malachi, and used by the tobacco industry for commercial gain. But at the end of the book, Malachi finds the Sirens are actually a statue on the bottom of Rumfoord’s swimming pool at his palace on Titan. The pool is polluted with algae and the Sirens are covered with slime and muck, but Malachi doesn’t care since he has grown to live a life of devotion to his wife Beatrice and is no longer temped by lust. Promiscuity and profits are no longer relevant when he finds he has a purpose. This is emblematic of how he has reached full maturity as a human being. While the book is framed as being about the search for the meaning of life, I think that the underlying thrust of the novel is that Malachi Constant is a man like Howard W. Campbell Jr. in Mother Night and maybe even like Meursault in Albert Camus’s The Stranger (which I consider to be the most misinterpreted book in the history of fiction except for the Bible); he is a man lacking in self-awareness. He only begins to grow when he confronts himself and develop the self-awareness he needs in order to become fully human. This process of transformation is the whole point of the story.

There isn’t much to detract from this novel. You could say that Beatrice is underdeveloped as a character as so many of the politically correct will say. But ultimately, The Sirens of Titan has too much going for it for me to really care.

And it is amazing how ahead of its time this book was. Written in the 1950s, it expresses the values of the late 1960s counter-cultures on an uncanny level. It is pro-peace and anti-war, it expresses the desire for all humans to unite, it portrays an African-American man who finds the love and justice he desires though music no less, it calls for a new way of living in the world, it involves space travel, exoticism, and fantasy that approach the kinds of psychedelia that would later show up in movies like Barbarella. It also serves as a statement about how beautiful world peace could be while poignantly reminding us that such an existence will likely never be possible. But despite that, we can still find meaning in life. Vonnegut’s optimism had a bitter tinge to it that reminds the reader how human we really are. Unlike Icarus, we will never fly too close to the sun and maybe that is something good. The Sirens of Titan makes me feel that Kurt Vonnegut Jr. will be remembered as a great American satirist, humanist, and humorist along the lines of Mark Twain. I realize now how lucky I am to have read this.

 

Book Review

Mother Night

by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

     Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s Mother Night is the darkest novel by this author I have encountered so far. As an early novel, it contains some of the types of characters, situations, ironies, and philosophical explortions that would be developed in his later works. But this is one of his first publications so it isn’t as polished or fully-realized as his subsequent works would be.

Mother Night tells the story of Howard Campbell Jr., a bland, everyday kind of American male. The narrative starts with him writing his final work of literature while confined in an Israeli prison since he is on trial for war crimes during World War II. How he got there is the obvious thrust of the plot. As a young man, Campbell went to live in Germany where he found a German wife and became a playwright of stature. When World War II broke out, his prominence in the theater scene earned him special status with the Nazis who admired his work. They gave him a job writing and delivering speeches in favor of the Third Reich. Campbell justified this to himself because he was also a double agent, working for the American military. After being approached by a spy in a German park, he agreed to lace his radio speeches with hidden meanings that could easily be picked up by commanding officers in the field. So Campbell had the unique distinction of promoting the cause of the allies and the axis simultaneously.

The twisted thing about this all is that Campbell is entirely apolitical. He only agrees to these arrangements so he can stay in Germany to be with his wife who dies soon after the war starts. At the beginning of the war, Campbell begins work on a statement about his apolitical stance, a play called A Nation of Two meant to explain that his only commitment in life is to his marriage, not to any political cause. He feels no hatred towards anybody whether they be Jews, Germans, Americans, Russians, Black people or anything. He feels no lyalty to them either. You could say that he has never reached full development as a human being. Campbell is also the kind of man who never says “no” to anybody. He acts under no agency of his own and lets himself be manipulated by anybody he encounters. The only exception to this is when he writes. In this way, Vonnegut draws a sharp distinction between Campbell’s public persona and his vacuous inner life. This dichotomy is set up to drive one point home that Vonnegut wants to make about human nature.

True to this author’s writing style, the narrative jumps around from place to place and from time to time. After the war ends, the U.S. military sneaks Campbell into New York City where he settles down in a brownstone attic, a place that becomes like a prison cell. In the apartment below lives a Jewish doctor and his mother who are both Holocaust survivors and below them, an elderly painter named Kraft that Campbell befriends. He doesn’t know it at first, but this man is a Soviet secret agent who has plans for Campbell as he acts as the deus ex machina of the novel.

Kraft secretly arranges for a dentist named Jones to show up at Campbell’s apartment. Jones is a middle-American crank, a white supremacist who listened to Campbell’s speeches via shortwave radio during the war. He regards Campbell as a hero. He shows up at the attic with his friends, a Nazi named Krapptauer, a Catholic priest named Keeley, and an African-American man he calls the Black Fuehrer. Later, when Jones is confronted by the police as to how he could be friends with a Catholic and a Black man, two groups of people he claims to hate, he says they are friends because they all have the same enemy, the Jews. Again, we are given another piece of the puzzle that Vonnegut constructs for the reader. He also brings a woman who says she is Helga, Campbell’s German wife. But nothing about her is as simple as it seems on the surface.

Helga turns out to be, in actuality, her sister Resi. After revealing this secret to Campbell, they agree to stay together as man and wife. Resi is yet another character who has contradictions in her personality. Aside from deceiving Campbell about her identity, she is also a secret agent for the communists. One thing she reveals to him that a Russian soldier, while fighting in Germany, found a trunk full of Campbell’s writings. He took them to the USSR and published them under his own name where they took off in popularity. His success as a writer is actually beyond his control, happens without him knowing about it, and even without his making any effort at getting published. Vonnegut is telling us that our work can have consequences beyond our reach, taking on a life of their own, and going places we never intended them to go. All the more reason we need to be careful.

Meanwhile, Krapptauer dies of exhaustion after climbing a staircase and Campbell agrees to give a speech at the funeral in front of a group of neo-Nazi teenagers despite his inner repugnance to their cause. Campbell remains characteristically unemotional and without affect throughout the whole book. As he meets up with Helga/Resi and the white supremacists at the funeral, his past is paraded in front of his eyes so that he sees the unintended consequences of his actions. He describes himself as being numb and emotionally dead. He is unable to reconcile the conflict of being a hero to Americans, Nazis, and Communists all that same time and he is also unable to fully engage with the atrocities of the Holocaust that he helped perpetuate. The simplest thing to do is to suppress his emotions, shut off his mind, and plunge himself into a catatonic stupor of anhedonia.

Campbell’s turning point comes when he gets stalked by an American soldier named O’Hare who confronts him in his attic. O’Hare represents a whole other side of Vonnegut’s world view. After returning from the war and being given a medal then sent on his way, he sinks into misery and poverty, becoming an alcoholic and moving from one dead-end job to another without purpose or glory. He expected to live the life of a war hero and instead becomes a bum and a loser. His solution is to hunt down and kill Campbell, the known Nazi war criminal.

Campbell, after coming face to face with his past, is ready to take control over his own life and atone for his sins. He fights off O’Hare and turns himself in to the Israeli embassy to be put on trial in Tel Aviv. He solves all his contradictions and liberates himself by voluntarily going to prison.

So what does it all mean? First off, Campbell exemplifies how we are what we do. In the eyes of society we can be different things to different people. We play different roles in a play depending on who we are talking to. This was written in the era of the sociologist Erving Goffman. To the American military, Campbell is an agent who helped them win the war. To the Nazis he is an effective propagandist. To the Soviets, he is celebrated as a writer of subversive literature, clandestinely sending subtle messages of resistance to the citizens of the oppressive Communist state. He was all of these and none of these at the same time. The fact that he believes in no political ideology is irrelevant during his trial because it is by his public persona that he get judged. Our inner lives, our true, selves, are of little or no consequence in how the public perceives us. However, the one thing we do know about Campbell’s inner life is the he was madly in love with his wife Helga. And so we are forced to ask the question of how far would we go to stay together with the person who matters most. Campbell did what he had to do to keep his marriage, his sacred bond, alive. Given this contradictory bundle of actions and motivations, are we still at liberty to judge Campbell as a person who is either good or bad?

The public personas that Vonnegut portrays are contradictory and confusing though. Each character’s flaws and virtues are on full display so we can examine why people do the confusing things that they do. Kraft, the Russian spy, sought a career in the Soviet secret service so he can live in America. Resi pretended to be her sister Helga so she can be with the man she had loved all her life. The Jewish doctor helped Campbell, the Nazi propagandist, because he learned from the Holocaust that helping people in need was better than judging them. The white supremacist Jones can be friends with a Catholic and an African-American because he believes they are all fighting for the same cause, no matter how idiotic that cause may be. O’Hare wanted to kill Campbell so that people who think of him as a nobody would see him as somebody. What Vonnegut is saying is that people are complex and life is confusing. To eliminate this confusion, people try to see the world in either/or dichotomies of black vs. white or good vs. evil. But this only muddies the waters more, creating more confusion and sometimes causing people to make bad decisions. Whether we support the axis or the allies, we are all coming from the same place and that place is one of confusion. Vonnegut isn’t asking us to forgive or sympathize with the Nazis, rather, he is asking us to admit that the confusion of life can lead people astray, causing them to do the wrong things and sometimes even terrible things. Asking us to examine the human side of Nazis is always a risky business, but I think Vonnegut is saying it is a necessity if we are going to prevent other atrocities like the Holocaust in the future. We don’t want to become like the Nazis we oppose. Vonnegut himself survived life in a prison camp during the bombing of Dresden. The trauma of this experience made him feel like equalized with people on all sides of the war and led him to write the kinds of novels he did for the sake of preventing future wars. The sincerity of his endeavor shines through in books like this and that is why he can get away with posing such controversial questions.

Mother Night is not perfect and I wouldn’t recommend it as the first Kurt Vonnegut novel anybody should read. He follows the dictum of showing without telling a little too carefully, and at times the narrative is so opaque that it might benefit from a little bit more explanation. There is a lot to unpack in this story and it may require some second-order thinking after you finish it. It is not his most direct writing. The flaws are few and minor though and Vonnegut would later iron out such wrinkles in other books.

Mother Night is a probe into the darkest regions of human motivations. It is a probe that levels all of its characters by stripping away all their appearances and exposing the messes inside them and around them. It shows how people are thrown into a world of confusion while making futile attempts at understanding it, shooting wildly in the dark, and bungling everything up further while tricking themselves into thinking we are on the side of the good. But it is impossible to know if we are really doing good so all we can do is keep doing what we do while hoping it is right. The ontological foundation of our existence is one of chaos and nonsense, but we can only forgive ourselves when we are courageous enough to admit that we made mistakes in our judgments, however terrible those mistakes may be. This is the bitterest of pills tp swallow, but one that may be necessary if we are to make progress as a species. And whatever you do, don’t be a man like Howard Campbell Jr., a man with no convictions, living without will and making no effort to take control over his life, getting blown around in whatever direction the wind takes him. Being informed and knowledgeable doesn’t guarantee you won’t make bad decisions, but at least it increases the chances that you might get something right.