Mother Night (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, Prisoners, Suicide, New York City, World War II, Existentialism, Nazism or Nazis, Espionage or spies, Germany or German people, Israel or Israelis
- Locales: New York, NY, Germany, Israel
Mother Night, Vonnegut's third novel, differs from its predecessors in having no emphasis on technology or use of a fictional future. It is the first to be written with a first-person narrator, which deepens the characterization of the protagonist and intensifies the soul-searching, both on his part and the author's, that goes on in this novel. Mother Night is also the first of his novels to have an autobiographical introduction, added to the 1966 edition, in which Vonnegut ruminates about his own wartime experience and his being of German origin. He notes: “If I’d...
[The entire page is 1161 words long]
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