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Kurt Vonnegut Mother Night Essay

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Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night explores the life of an American Spy, Howard W. Campbell Jr., living the life of a Nazi propagandist during the Second World War. Campbell grows distant throughout the novel and is unable to make decisions on his own. Vonnegut displays that tragedy has extensive and long lasting effects on an individual. This idea is shown through Campbell’s loss of his writings, the death of his wife and the actions of the war he witnessed. Before Campbell was recruited to be an American-Spy, he was a writer and a playwright who really enjoyed his profession. The loss of his writings and plays gradually affected his well-being. He used to write about romance and most of his stories included his wife Helga. Campbell is no longer the man he used to be; the day he locked up his writings in the theater, he also left his old self there. Helga and his works were the only things he cared about, the two things in his life that gave him a meaning to live. Campbell was aware that he was leaving a part of himself in the theater; when Resi brought him the chest he left his works in, he said he remembered closing it at the start of the war “remembered when I’d thought of the trunk as a coffin for the young man I would never be again.” (Vonnegut 123) He also finds a poem he wrote inside the trunk lid saying “Here lies Howard Campbell’s essence … If his body and his essence remain apart, burn his body, but spare this, his heart.” (Vonnegut 124) Campbell’s writings are his

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