World War II
Rebekah Sheldon Kurt Vonnegut opens Mother Night, his third novel, by explaining that he is not and never has been a Nazi. The closest he came was a youthful encounter with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion when he was a kid in the ’30s in Indianapolis. The Protocols is one of the most infamous examples of what …
Ted Castronova In Mother Night Vonnegut finally unleashes a long-held rage directly at its target: The Second World War. Many people see WWII as horrible because of what Germans did. They tend to overlook what Russians, English, and Americans did. Vonnegut can’t, because he was witness to what American and British bombs did to German civilians. As an American POW, …
Jonathan Elmer An insurrection erupts, and is crushed. We are in the years following World War III, and the United States has emerged victorious again. Player Piano is set, more or less, in our present time (Vonnegut tells us that “the characters are modeled after persons as yet unborn, or, perhaps, at this writing”—1952—“infants”). Of course, there has not yet …
