ABSTRACT
In Mother Night, with its historical anxiety and its note of resigned humanism, Kurt Vonnegut clearly came close to the mood of the times, when black humor was becoming a dominant feature in American fiction. These were the Kennedy years, when writers seemed to be moving closer to history in order to look at its absurdist disturbances and destruction, yet at the same time were more preoccupied with the nature of fictions – a theme central to Vonnegut’s next novel, Cat’s Cradle. Vonnegut is careful to show how simple literature does the same for anyone who can keep aware of the playmaking in one’s pretense. As Bokononism displays its own artifice, so does the novel that surrounds it. Psalms are rewritten as ‘calypsos’ whose rinky-tink beat unsettles their familiar content; parables and admonitions are retranslated in a way that emphasizes the process of getting to a provisional belief rather than the belief itself.
