![]() Accordingly, the first chapter deals with the historical accounts revealed in the novel, the relevance of using emplotment modes and the construction of history through self-narration. This objective will be realized in a two-fold way: through exploring both the meta-fictional and the historical features of the novel. The aim of the present research is therefore to examine Mother Night through the lens of historiography and test a new way of looking at meta-fictional literature that is laden with history. Unlike the majority of other studies that dealt with the literary content and form of the novel, the question that this thesis raises is rather concerned with the extent to which a work of fiction is able to transcend its own generic boundaries and serve as a basis for a historiographical study. I have never seen a more sublime demonstration of the totalitarian mind, a mind which might be linked unto a system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random.Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night is a collage of historical events written under the guise of a meta-fictional novel. 'And, before it gets back on the right track,' said Jones, 'some heads are going to roll.' He nodded, and so did Father Keeley and the Black Fuehrer. 'This once-proud country of ours is falling into the hands of wrong people,' said Jones. 'What's so mysterious about that?' said Jones. 'You talk about the Catholics and the Negroes-' said the G-man, 'and yet your two best friends are a Catholic and a Negro.' ![]() 'The Jews have infiltrated everything!' said Jones, smiling the smile of a logician who could never be topped. 'That proves what I've just been saying!' said Jones. 'For your information,' said the G-man in cool triumph, 'I am a Jew.' 'Haven't you even found that in the course of your work? The Jews! The Catholics! The Negroes! The Orientals! The Unitarians! The foreign-born, who don't have any understanding of democracy, who play right into the hands of the socialists, the communists, the anarchists, the anti-Christs and the Jews!' 'Why bother us? Everything we do is to make the country stronger! Join with us, and let's go after the people who are trying to make it weaker!' ![]() 'All I've done, 'he said majestically, 'is do what you people should be doing.' Jones stopped halfway down the stairs, confronted his tormentors. Jones, the Black Fuehrer, and Father Keeley before them.ĭr. “More raiders came down the stairs prodding the Reverend Dr. "After two years of hearing that call over the loudspeakers, between the music," Gutman said to me, "the position of corpse-carrier suddenly sounded like a very good job.” In an institution in which the purpose was to kill human beings by the millions, it was an understandably common cry. Translation: "Corpse-carriers to the guardhouse." "Leichentärger zu Wache," he crooned, his eyes still closed. "There was one announcement that was always crooned, like a nursery rhyme. He closed his eyes, remembered gropingly. "And the music was always stopping in the middle," he said, "and then there was an announcement. "That was forbidden." "Naturally," I said. Those who were musical told me it was often good music-sometimes the best." There was much music played through them. "There were loudspeakers all over the camp," he said, "and they were never silent for long. And he thought about Auschwitz, the thing he liked least to think about. He went away for a little while, after having confessed that. "No," he said, looking me straight in the eye, "even though I was one of the ones who volunteered." "No," he said, "That is why I would pay a great deal of money for a book with the answer in it." "If you would write a book about that," he said, "and give the answer to that question, that 'Why?'-you would have a very great book." Gutman told me that many men actually volunteered for the Sonderkommando. The first duty of their successors was to dispose of their remains. When the job was done, the members of the Sonderkommando were themselves killed. At Auschwitz it meant a very special detail indeed-one composed of prisoners whose duties were to shepherd condemned persons into gas chambers, and then to lug their bodies out. "I had just been assigned to the Sonderkommando," he said to me, "when the order came from Himmler to close the ovens down." According to his own reluctant account, he came this close to going up a smokestack of a crematorium there: “He spent two years in the extermination camp at Auschwitz.
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