![]() Augustine’s Confessions, and thus a different genre from the forensic confession of guilt. Moreover, the use of the plural “confessions” brings to mind St. It is far too literary to constitute just a legal confession. Yet, the title that Campbell himself suggests for these confessions, “Mother Night,” a phrase taken from a speech by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust, suggests that this is not simply-or perhaps even primarily-a legal confession. He is standing trial in Israel, and these confessions are, presumably, his way of pleading guilty to the crime of propagandizing for the Nazi cause. Tuviah Friedman, Director of the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of Nazi War Crimes, and to whomever else this may concern.” From this, it seems that what we have here is a legal confession. The straight answer to this question is given on page 1, where Campbell explains that he addresses this book to “Mr. I found myself puzzled by the nature, purpose and audience of Campbell’s confessions, and I want to explore this topic in what follows. Campbell Jr.” This Vonnegut has changed a few things-he has “lied” at times-but only in the interests of style and to attain a higher artistic truth.Īfter these framing devices, we are presented with the fictional Campbell’s confessions. Then there is Vonnegut the fictional editor of the American edition of “The Confessions of Howard W. After the flames subsided, he then worked to excavate and bury the many German corpses. The introduction is by Vonnegut himself, who describes how he worked as a prisoner, making a delicious malt syrup for pregnant women-presumably only for pregnant Aryan women-in the city of Dresden, and how he survived the Anglo-American attack by hiding out in an underground meat cooler. Campbell, Jr., and a few metafictional layers intervene between Campbell and Vonnegut. Mother Night is not his memoir, but rather, the memoir of the fictional Howard W. ![]() ![]() The novel does not deal with Vonnegut’s experience directly, however. From the introduction we learn that Mother Night deals to some extent with what must have been the author’s own traumatic involvement as an American soldier in WWII and his time as a P.O.W. Vonnegut’s first novel takes us into an automated, dystopian future his second carries us deep into outer space but Mother Night (1961), his third novel, brings us back to Earth and to the not-so-distant past. By Dan Pyle in Philosophy and Environmental Studies on JSandy Shapshay ![]()
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