Vonnegut's fictional paradox presents us with Hitler admiring Lincoln's
appreciation for and explanation of a soldier's supreme sacrifice, while
Wirtanen/ Sparrow is at a loss to find a meaning for any amount of carnage, "A
moral? It's a big enough job just burying the dead, without trying to draw a moral
from each death" ( MN, 137).

What reliable record is left for Campbell.? Apparently none outside
himself--and he explains that because he feels so compromised by being a
negligible player in his own destiny, he decides to commit suicide. But he ends the
text with a cryptically punctuated "Auf wiedersehen?" Though we later learn in
Slaughterhouse-Five that Campbell did commit suicide. It is hard to believe his
commitment within this text. As Vonnegut says in his editor's note to the text, "To
say that he was a playwright is to offer an even harsher warning to the reader, for
no one is a better liar than a man who has warped lives and passions onto
something as grotesquely artificial as a stage" ( MN, ix). Considering Campbell's
schizophrenia, which part of him would be the executioner for crimes against
himself?

Vonnegut Kurt. Mother Night. Harper and Row, Publishers, 1961, 1966.

-----. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, 1969.

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