verbava все записи автора Leonard Mustazza - Forever Pursuing the Genesis
Das Reich der Zwei - Mother Night

59
If we link the title's possible [mythic] meaning to the morals that Vonnegut does specify [about pretending, death and love], we are left with the question how are pretense, death, and love associated with the primeval mythic personag referred to in the title? The answer to that question will be the subject of this chapter.

62
The concept of mythic backward movements and miscreations that [classical authors] speak of can well be applied to Vonnegut's novel... For his entire life, Campbell has benn involved in nothing so much as attempting to create for himself a little universe, a limited sphere of operations in which he can enjoy order, beauty, light, and love.

63
Mother Night... is not concerned simply with the small, beguilling truths that one invents for oneself to survive happily. Rather, its main focus is the collision of one man's little world with those of potent others within the greater chaos; and in a more general and figurative sense, with the endless conflict between our own "supercilious lights" and the greater darkness.

65
Like his counterparts in other Vonnegut novels, Howard uses as a means of escape a mental construct that represents for him a re-creation of reality along familiar mythic lines. The particular creation myth to which he subscribes is... a well-known and conventional one that Vonnegut turns to again and again in his fiction: the story of Noah.

66
[Howard is] not equating his life to Noah's during the flood, but rather to the periods before and after the great deluge. According to the account in Genesis, both periods are marked by widespread immorality... Howard has long found the world to be a mad and corrupt place in which he takes little direct interest. In his own eyes at least, he is like the blameless Noah in that he considers himself sane while those around him are mad; and he remains sane, he believes, by simply refusing to participate in the external world, only in the well-ordered and just world of his own artistic creation. Even Frank Wirtanen, who wants to recruit Howard as a spy--in fact, to force him to participate in the madness--remarks upon Howard's pristine artistic creations.

67
[After meeting Helga] he constructs... a "nation of two" which, in mythic terms, takes the happy couple all the way back to the innocent nation that Adam and Eve enjoyed before the fall.

74
In light of Howard's attempts at mythic re-creation throughout his life, concerns that are negatively expressed in Vonnegut's very choice of a title for this novel... it follows that Howard believes not that he has caused evil in the world but that he has allowed evil to enter his own world, which is the only one that ever mattered to him.

75
By letting others violate that world after he guarded it jealously for so long, he allowed the forces of Mother Night to come in and establish her reign.