Media can be used for myriad purposes and has the capacity to transmit both good and evil. Media serves as an apt metaphor in Mother Night because it reflects the moral and political ambiguity of humanity itself. Kafka famously stated that “a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.” Vonnegut’s narrative devices, alter egos, double-identities, and unreliable narration chip away at that frozen sea. Furthermore, by partitioning his own identity as a writer and he prompts readers into more imaginative and, ultimately, more empathetic modes of being. It’s good for you.” What do these stock phrases have to do with the story at hand? Nothing really, making the reader immediately mistrustful of a narrator that seems inclined to spout out odd bits of folk wisdom at random. These include such platitudes as “When you’re dead you’re dead,” and “Make love when you can.
For example: at the beginning of the novel Vonnegut lays out a few morals of the story. He thus disorients readers, creating ironies and paradoxes. Vonnegut seeks to problematize his authorial voice for the reader by toying with the narrative point of view. Vonnegut’s meta-fiction creates an ironic distance, giving readers the space to formulate their own opinions and not be bullied by the author. Of his early novels, Mother Night may be boldest in its use of meta-fiction and subversive writing to this effect. Vonnegut employs various devices to achieve this effect in many of his other novels – perhaps most notably in Breakfast of Champions. The purpose of the meta-fictional song and dance is straightforward: Vonnegut seeks to undermine the reader’s trust in his authority as an author in order to provoke the reader into drawing his or her own conclusions. In fact, readers of the book will find that as sympathetic as she is, her indictment of this banal evil and her accusation of Eichmann’s clownishness are more poignant than those accusing him of active evil. This is not to say she easily forgave Eichmann his sins. She famously described Eichmann’s form of evil as banal, rather than truly willful. Arendt considered Eichmann to be clownish rather than malevolent and found his actions understandable within the context of ideological bureaucracy. Hannah Arendt famously attracted as much attention as much for her coverage of a sensational figure – the notorious Eichmann – as for her seemingly sympathetic consideration of him.
Though Arendt’s book appeared years after Vonnegut’s, she wrote about the Eichmann trial, which occurred in 1961, the same year Mother Night was released, serially for The New Yorker. Vonnegut was clearly inspired by Eichmann, and even possibly Arendt. Both were former SS members, both fled Nazi Germany to escape from judgment (particularly the Nuremberg Trials) after the victory of Allied forces, and both were brought back to Israel for trial. bears a remarkable similarity to Adolf Eichmann, at least superficially. Campbell, Jr., a high profile Nazi propagandist who is brought back to Jerusalem years after World War II in order to be tried for his crimes against the Jewish people, against humanity, and, as Campbell puts it, against his own conscience. Mother Nightfollows the exploits of Howard W. Just two years before Arendt’s book, Vonnegut published, Mother Night, which dealt with remarkably similar themes as Arendt’s. Eichmann, a former member of the Nazi SS largely responsible instituting the logistics of the mass incarceration and extermination of millions of Jews, was captured in Argentina by Israeli foreign intelligence agents and brought to Israel to answer for his crimes. In her 1963 book Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt presented her collected reports on Adolf Eichmann’s Jerusalem trial for crimes against humanity and the Jewish people.
0 kommentar(er)
