Mother Night

“This is the only story of mine whose moral I know. 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.”

Perhaps Vonnegut’s most famous quote, other than, “So it goes,” which also appears in the introduction for the first time. Immediately, Vonnegut positions his novel as an exploration of morality—in particular, the consequences of personal choices and the danger of lying to oneself.

“This book is rededicated to Howard W. Campbell, Jr., a man who served evil too openly and good too secretly, the crime of his times.”

Campbell’s vacillation between dedicating his book to Mata Hari and to himself speaks to the strength of his ego, but also to his desire to produce something good, as in morally good, under his own name. This concern with good and evil extends through the work, which itself is an exploration of ‘the crime of his times’ in each of its characters.

“‘You are the only man I ever heard of...who has a bad conscience about what he did in the war. Everybody else, no matter what side he was on, no matter what he did, is sure a good man could not have acted in any other way.’”

The words of Bernard Mengel, Campbell’s prison guard, describing the flattening aspect of war, in which moral calculation is discarded, or, as Mengel indicates, individually justified until it is no longer a question. Mengel’s assessment of Campbell’s conscience also speaks to Campbell’s double-sided truth; he isn’t feeling guilty, he simply longs for his lost love, but he gives of the appearance of guilt.