Mother Night

At the start of his career in Mother Night, Campbell is a young Romantic playwright who professes lofty ideals he may or may not believe, a characteristic exploited by Wirtanen and by Campbell himself. By the end of his life, he has become a realist about what he has done and the harm he has caused. Throughout most of the novel, Campbell is in the grips of his metaphorical “schizophrenia,” a splitting of self that allows him to keep a moral distance from the horrendous acts he commits. Through the process of writing his Confessions, Campbell finally faces his own moral reckoning. When Epstein’s grandmother mispronounces his name as Kahm-Boo, he understands that she has spoken his true, secret name and thus assigned to him his true moral identity—as one who has caused, or enabled, immense suffering. He accepts responsibility for his actions, finally acting to punish himself when the world seems unable to do so. In this sense, his death is less a suicide than the carrying out of a sentence that, in his view, should have been applied by the courts.

Much of the veracity of Campbell’s account can be questioned. He calls his writing of the account, “a command performance” (166) and he mentions, a few times, his “several selves” (184); it is never clear which self is the composer of the Confessions.