Mother Night

Mother Night is populated with characters—Nazis, white supremacists, enslavers, Russian double-agents—who are typically viewed as morally corrupt, yet the text, written from the perspective of a Nazi war criminal, remains ambiguous in its denunciations of what is nominally thought of as evil. Campbell reserves his deepest vitriol for Jones and his white supremacist associates, which seems a straightforward upholding of progressive American virtues, but he also turns the same amount of vitriol toward Bernard O’Hare, an American serviceman whose worst ostensible crimes are wanting to bring a war criminal to justice and elevating the conflict between himself and Campbell to the level of Good versus Evil. In so doing, Vonnegut asks his readers to re-evaluate their own conceptions of the nature of evil.

Initially, Campbell’s conception of evil has more in common with Adolf Eichmann’s “just following orders” defense than he would like to admit. He has close interactions with high-ranking members of the Nazi government, and he does not appear to regard them with the moral revulsion readers might expect. The names Goebbels, Hoess, Göring, and Eichmann would have been instantly familiar to readers, and would have evoked the dizzying evil of the Nazi apparatus. Campbell, however, sees these men simply as colleagues, and he admits that, “Only in retrospect can I think of them trailing slime behind” (36), otherwise, they are simply “people” (36) no different than any other.

It is not until Campbell arrives in America that his personal disgust is raised by the Nazi-funded efforts of Dr. Jones, whom he describes as “a race-baiter who is ignorant and insane” (69). The difference is that Jones is neither carrying out orders nor playing a role: He genuinely and fervently believes in the racist ideology he espouses. For Campbell, Jones’s lack of self-analysis, particularly in terms of his racist beliefs, is what sets him apart. For Campbell, the inner beliefs that motivate one’s actions have greater moral weight than the outward consequences of those actions. At this point in the text, the reader can see what Campbell cannot—that his moral philosophy is built on self-deception and that he will not be able to sustain it forever. Though even Jones, much in the same approach to the Nazis, is not portrayed as an unabashedly evil character, just one who is acting on information and belief systems that are faulty. This is the truer portrait of Evil, one Campbell compares to a cuckoo clock in Hell (224), a willful evil, not one widespread, but one refined by each and every person. This, Campbell suggests, is the insidious evil that translates to mass travesty.

Vonnegut further refines his analysis of Evil’s true face, in Campbell’s final interaction with O’Hare. O’Hare represents the typical Western approach to notions of Good and Evil, in particular the prominent myth that the American military stood as a force of Good against the Nazi Evil. O’Hare, after a mediocre and disappointing life, needs for Campbell to be “pure evil” (249) in order to take action, to find that his life has meaning, all his actions have direction. This motivating aspect of Evil, as judged against a known Good, becomes a dangerous ideology in Campbell’s vision, and obliterates the moral ambiguity that makes up so much of life. This known existence of Evil, and the drive to stamp it out, becomes the organizing factor for O’Hare’s whole existence. It is obvious it is a projection, but to O’Hare, who is desperate for a direction, it is as concrete as anything else.

By casting O’Hare in this manner, Vonnegut underscores the fact that hate is not bounded by national borders or distinct thought patterns of specific groups of people. Vonnegut is reacting against perceptions that World War II was a ‘good war,’ and in particular that by defeating the German people, such incidents of hate a fascism can also be defeated. The wide cast of American Fascists and white supremacists makes clear that such an obliterative action is simple ideological fancy, an unwillingness to accept the facts, and thus a perpetuation of the cuckoo clock in Hell mentality that allows for unquestioned hate to perpetuate.

And this, according to Campbell, is the true definition of Evil (251). It is not aligned under an ideological side, it is in fact a deficit of human nature that is not adequately analyzed, a result of a lacking introspection, a willingness to blind oneself, rather than experience life for the confusing multiplicity it is. Evil is separating the mass of interrelated humanity into camps of good and bad. This, Campbell asserts, is the poisonous thinking “that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly” (251). It is the Evil that haunts human minds, and, if unchecked, will continue to unleash atrocity after atrocity.