Mother Night (Masterplots II: American Fiction Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
- First Published: 1961
- Type of Plot: Comic realism
- Time of Work: 1938-1961
- Setting: Nazi Germany, New York City, and Israel
- Principal Characters: Howard W. Campbell, Jr., Helga Noth, Resi Noth, Major Frank Wirtanen, George Kraft, Lieutenant Bernard B. O’Hare
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: New York
- Locales: New York, NY
The Novel
Mother Night—the title comes from a speech by Mephistopheles in Faust—is presented as the written memoir or confession of Howard W. Campbell, Jr. It has supposedly been edited by “Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.,” who offers a signed editor’s note concluding that Campbell “served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.” Yet it is evident that Campbell speaks for Vonnegut—as an unpretentious Everyman.
Against his better judgment, Campbell, an American who lived for a dozen years in Germany, agreed to become an intelligence...
[The entire page is 2063 words long]
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