Mother Night

The closest Vonnegut gets to “Nazi monkey business” until letting go in Slaughterhouse-Five. Framed as Howard W. Campbell, Jr.’s memoirs requested by Israeli war crimes investigators, he is an American by birth, a German playwright by occupation, an American spy and, by necessity, a member of the Nazi party tasked with badmouthing the Allied forces through English language broadcasts.

Mother Night is a study of the stateless schizophrenic Howard Campbell’s hyphenated sense of self, trapped by the peculiarities of heredity and environment that mitigate any attempt to produce a satisfying self-image.

Not so oddly, Vonnegut was a German American scout captured at the Battle of the Bulge, imprisoned by those he could envision as distant cousins, misunderstood by his captors because he spoke German and had an obviously shared heritage, before being firebombed in his ancestors’ homeland by his own countrymen (and its ally, England). It is no wonder that Vonnegut begins with the moral of the novel, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”

The Sirens of Titan

The premise of the novel is that all of human history has been one big Rube Goldberg invention by the Tralfamadorians for the single purpose of getting a spare part to their stranded but intrepid intergalactic messenger, Salo. It takes nearly all of human history to do so.

Beyond that grossly inadequate summary, Sirens is the birthplace for key Vonnegutian concepts that reappear in later novels. It is here we first learn of Tralfamadore, as well as the chrono-synclastic infundibulum (where otherwise contradictory viewpoints are all truthful), and the untoward influences of organized religion that has too often been wielded with vengeance. It is also a continuation of Vonnegut’s literary and personal struggle with identity and the capriciousness of wealth and desire.