![]() ![]() While his reputation rose significantly after the appearance of Slaughterhouse-Five in 1969, his literary stock plummeted again after the 1976 publication of Slapstick. Mother Night was re-issued in hardcover for the first time in 1966, after the cult success of 1963’s Cat’s Cradle, but even then, Vonnegut’s work tended to be dismissed by the literary establishment. Both Sirens and Mother Night were initially published as paperback originals and were not reviewed. While that book received decent reviews, including a positive New York Times assessment by Granville Hicks, it did not make a large splash, and, along with his second book, The Sirens of Titan, earned Vonnegut the label of a “genre” writer of science fiction rather than a serious literary artist. Vonnegut’s literary reputation in general has been very mixed among critics of contemporary American literature since his first novel, Player Piano, was published in 1952. Such criticism even had a real-world effect when Polish officials, despite the existence of Polish versions of all of Vonnegut’s other novels, refused to allow Mother Night to be published there until 1984, citing Vonnegut’s “whimsical attitude toward the Nazis” as the reason ( Jamosky and Klinkowitz 218). Yet, despite recognizing the thorny moral issues raised by the novel, many critics tend to see the American Nazis that Vonnegut depicts in the book as ludicrous caricatures that may diminish the seriousness of his intent. 1 The novel, with its famous moral-“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (v)-added in Vonnegut’s new introduction to the 1966 edition, raises questions about constructed identity, the limits of nationalism, and whether the ends justify the means as it probes whether Campbell did more harm as an anti-Semitic Nazi propagandist than good as an Allied double agent. Although Campbell insists that he was really a double-agent sending coded messages to the Allies during his radio broadcasts, he can provide no evidence to support this claim and is currently being held in a Jerusalem prison, awaiting trial for war crimes. Campbell, Jr., an American-born Nazi propagandist during World War II. The novel is presented as the prison “confessions” of Howard W. ![]() ![]() Kurt Vonnegut’s 1962 novel, Mother Night, like his later and better-known work, Slaughterhouse- Five, explores the shadowy line separating good and evil during wartime. ![]()
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