JasonKoivu

I'm going to make an unpopular statement right now: This is the best of Kurt Vonnegut's novels. Okay Cat's Cradle and Slaughterhouse Five fans, fling your dung at me, I understand.

The characters, setting, plot, all of it comes together in a well-wrapped tale in which a man fights the truth of his own identity under the pressing weight of the author's imposed moral law that states you are what you pretend to be. In Mother Night, the story of an American spy working undercover within Germany during WWII as a Nazi propagandist, Vonnegut intentionally portrays his main character with so much ambivalence that by the end you're not sure whether to root for or against him.

Vonnegut's oft used theme, the struggle within, is at its strongest here where the main character is pitted against a real monster of an antagonist: the preponderance of evidence against himself. In other Vonnegut books I understand and sympathized with the self doubt his characters felt, but in some cases their struggles felt light to me. I should add that I read most of the author's works when I was a fresh-faced twenty year old with few cares in the world, so I don't think I understood his subject matter, that of the life-wearied, often middle-aged person whose accumulated weight of stress, daily concerns and self doubt brought on by crises endured through a life rife with experiences with horror, love, hate and, worst of all, ennui. So perhaps one day, maybe when I turn 50, I will reread Player Piano and it will rocket from my least favorite to most favorite of all of Kurt Vonnegut's wonderful novels, but for right now Mother Night stays there.