Mother Night

The motif of hiding runs throughout Mother Night, beginning with Vonnegut’s stated moral “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be” (v). The act of pretending to be something suggests a denial of a ‘true’ self elsewhere, so as often as the motif of hiding arises in the novel, so does that of wanting to be free. The image of Campbell perpetually waiting for the absolving call of “Olly-olly-ox-in-free” (24) is an enduring one for his character, and one he returns to throughout the work, almost clinging to the hope that should he hear the call, his ‘true’ self will emerge, and he can cast aside the Nazi he is pretending to be.

Campbell is not alone, however; virtually all the novel’s characters are hiding aspects of themselves. In order to understand these characters, the reader must reflect not on the outward clues they offer, but also on the inner motivations they hide. Campbell, of course, rejects such peering, and presents his motivations as shallow, though in writing his Confessions, he acknowledges that he has spent his life hiding, and though the life he leads is a sham, it is also the only truth he has.