If he had not been such a pacifist, Kurt Vonnegut would have made a hell of a boxer.
I say this knowing full well that Vonnegut was not an impressive physical specimen. His posture was miserable, his countenance was haggard and his lungs were lacquered with so much tar from smoking unfiltered Pall Malls you’d have thought he’d spent his life paving interstate highways. And no self-respecting prizefighter would ever have entered a ring with that tumbleweed hair.
But if words were fists, Vonnegut would have been able to knock out Sonny Liston, perhaps as easily as he floored readers with his dead-on observations of the 20th century. “History often goes hand-in-hand with sports,” Vonnegut wrote in Mother Night, his other novel about World War II, the one he published eight years before Slaughterhouse-Five, that literary champion of pith. “So it goes.” “Poo-Tee-Weet.” “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” “Listen.” Who else has been able to compress so much power, so much fight, into so few words? Hemingway, that master of economy and precision, may have worn the muscles and the gloves, but Vonnegut wore the belt.
Mother Night is not a long book, and an undistracted reader could finish it in a matter of hours, the novel’s pacing brisker and its narrative more-linear than most other Vonnegut works. The narrator, Howard W. Campbell Jr., engages in far less time-traveling than does Billy Pilgrim in Slaughterhouse-Five; at least, Campbell’s time-traveling takes place entirely within his head, as he recounts his work as an American secret agent whose mission was so highly classified only a handful of people knew about it. Campbell’s work as a Nazi propagandist, in which he delivered coded messages to the Allies through popular radio transmissions, made him a celebrity in Germany and a villain in the rest of the world. This happened because Campbell did his job too well: The Nazis never questioned his allegiance to their genocidal cause — doubly significant given his claims to have defected from the United States — and neither did his compatriots back home.
After the war, when the American government fails to reveal Campbell’s true motivation to the world and all but deafens the former spy with its silence, he becomes, to borrow from the title of a later Vonnegut book, a man without a country. As Campbell attempts to quietly and somewhat anonymously reclaim himself in post-war New York, Mother Night proves to be as much an examination of identity — be it personal, political or national — as it is an anti-war parable. This being a Vonnegut novel, Campbell’s efforts will not be rewarded. “I didn’t get the job, and I didn’t want it, either,” Campbell says, recalling the time he sought a position teaching German in a New York private school. “I applied, I think, simply to demonstrate to myself that there really was such a person as me.”
This brings me back to the boxing analogy and the way Vonnegut can lay me flat with only a handful of words. “To demonstrate to myself that there really was such a person as me.” Who can’t relate to this worry, this idea that you may not actually exist, at least not in any distinct, recognizable sense. Sure, you have a body, with a skull and a face and a brain, but what about a conscience? Do you have that? And a soul? Do you have one of those, if such a thing as a soul is even possible? Late in the book, Campbell answers these questions for himself when he tells a policeman: “Each person does a little something, and there you are.” And there I am, floored again by a few simple words.
