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Mother night author7/30/2023 ![]() Vonnegut is in effect arguing that our character in fact consists in our actions, so that this distinction is simply a fig leaf. To pretend is to act in a way which is not “us”, which does not really reflect our character. At the end of the day, which will matter more- my lifelong participation in industrial capitalism, or the private thoughts of my heart? Yet I do it because of other values I hold, like security and pleasure. Doing so clearly does not reflect my values, or at least not some of them, ones I happen to cherish. If I search my own life for a major instance of Vonneguttian pretend, it would surely be my own participation in an ecosystem-destroying culture. I am just going along with this on the outside to get by.” Vonnegut’s message is that the separation I just described between how we act externally and who we really are is imaginary. He is talking about engaging in activities which do not agree with what we ourselves feel are our own core morals while telling ourselves, “This is not who I really am. Vonnegut is not, I believe, talking about mere inauthenticity. Who among us is not pretending to be something they’re not out of belief that it is required, serves a larger cause, or if neither of those, at least serves our own interest and is harmless? As was probably clear to you as you read Vonnegut’s explicit identification of what it is, it is an intimately chilling one. ![]() ![]() Clearly he intends, as he says, for us to draw a universal moral. Vonnegut’s novel is not really about the ethical complexities of WW2. Vonnegut’s lesson seems to be that the evils Campbell took part in- even if his intentions were otherwise- have, in the end, made him guilty in his own eyes and destroyed his soul. Unbeknownst to the Nazis, all of the apparent irrelevancies of Campbell’s speech – his deliberate pauses, his coughs or grunts – are coded transmissions to the US.Īt the end of the novel, Campbell is offered an attempt at exoneration, but he turns it down and instead takes his own life. In fact Campbell was a double agent who worked his way up through Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda organization, eventually broadcasting radio shows aimed at converting Americans to the Nazi cause. Campbell is there awaiting a war crimes trial for his actions as a Nazi propagandist. It is framed as his memoir, written in an Israeli jail cell. Mother Night is the story of an American spy in Germany- Howard W. “I don’t think it’s a marvelous moral I simply happen to know what it is: We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” “This is the only story of mine whose moral I know,” writes Kurt Vonnegut at the beginning of his 1962 novel Mother Night.
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