I would love to make an argument that "Mother Night" is Kurt Vonnegut's best novel. I know in school "Slaughter House Five" was required reading. I read it a couple times in college, because I had, by my standards, good professors that knew what they were talking about when they talked about Vonnegut. But, I really wish they would have made us read "Mother Night" too.
"Mother Night" is a great novel for younger people to discuss, because it deals with how we judge people. Do we judge them by how they appear on the outside, or do we judge them by what is on the inside? Questions like this are important to discuss when going through our early adult life.
When you read about Vonnegut's life; especially, how he survived the bombing of Dresden. A reader of his novels can't help but see why his books make such great points when it comes to the mental state of people that survive wars.
You don't have to fight in a war to know that wars change people, and Vonnegut, excelled at find his voice when it came to writing about how World War II changed him. Yes, his work is fiction, but it is the fiction from a mind that survived the war and didn't know what to think afterwards.
It is hard to say why it took him so long to write about the war, but maybe his war books wouldn't have been as good if he tried to write them right after war.
"Mother Night" captures the schizophrenic mind of Howard Campbell Jr who is an American spy in Germany. In Hitler's Germany, Mr. Campbell is a propagandist for the Nazi state.
I don't want to give too much of the plot away, and I won't, but I will say that it raises some good points about character, what a person believes, and what we really know about the people.It also raises questions about how we need punish a few people for horrendous acts perpetrated on society, when it is obvious that more than a few people are guilty.
Maybe my argument wasn't strong enough for "Mother Night," but read the book and see why Vonnegut was a great writer.
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