Even though Jessie diligently catalogues ever item the pair owns, it appears that she has finally turned the corner in her life. Following her latest episode a year earlier which resulted in her husband Cecil leaving and divorcing her, Jessie has moved back home with her mother Thelma.
Chilling in its message and delivered with no intermission, 'Night, Mother tells the tale of a mother and daughter grappling to stay afloat in life.įorty-year-old Jessie Cates has battled epilepsy, mental illness, and depression for her entire life. Produced the year after Beth Henley won the Pulitzer for Crimes of the Heart, the two women ushered in a renaissance of Southern female play writing. Following her lates 'Night, Mother is Marsha Norman's play that won the Pulitzer for drama in 1983. Forty-year-old Jessie Cates has battled epilepsy, mental illness, and depression for her entire life. Chilling in its message and delivered with no intermission, 'Night, Mother tells the tale of a mother and daughter grappling to stay afloat in life. Perhaps.'Night, Mother is Marsha Norman's play that won the Pulitzer for drama in 1983. Perhaps now I might finally be ready for something far more difficult: to read (or at least watch) Schindler’s List. Already understanding the historical context of a given novel when first getting into it helps a reader delve into its deeper levels.
Thus in Mother Night, we yet again get a sense of autobiography from Vonnegut in a way that only the best writers can perform.īecause this book also deals with some of the harsh realities of the Holocaust-at least in Vonnegut’s own irreverent way-it makes me happy to have recently read such books as The Auschwitz Escape, The House on Garibaldi Street, and Invisible Eagle. What makes this story as historically interesting as his far more popular Slaughterhouse Five, is the fact of Vonnegut’s own World War II experience: a German-American soldier who fought for the Allies and was eventually captured and interred at Dresden. All told, they still maintain Vonnegut’s trademark societal criticisms, but they also tend to detract from the story at hand.
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Instead, the chapters seem to merely turn into an endless series of random dialogue and off-color anecdotes. As happens in many of Vonnegut’s books, however, the story kind of gets muddled partway through, as if chronology no longer matters to the story. There’s no mention of Kilgore Trout, of course, but Campbell himself turns out to be a fairly multi-faced character himself. This third novel from the prolific Vonnegut is certainly an interesting tale, even though it lacks much of the sci-fi subplots that generally characterize his stories. The problem is, no one in the American government who knew is willing to speak up for “the radio scourge of the Jews,” for fear of losing their great ally in the Middle East. Accused of war crimes committed as a radio propagandist for the Nazi War Machine, Campbell tries to argue for leniency from his Jewish captors, for although he said many horrendous things against the Jewish race, he did so while also divulging German state secrets as an American double-agent. Campbell Jr., an American Nazi, from his jail cell in Israel in the years following the war.
This strangely normal tale from the otherwise oddball-idea author, Kurt Vonnegut, is the recorded memories of Howard W. “We are what we want to be, and so we must be careful what we pretend to be.” ( Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut, 1961)
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