- Rush Limbo
- Sep 5, 2005
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its with a full house
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All these quotes make Mother Night my favorite Vonnegut novel. For those who haven't read it, I highly recommend it! The main protagonist is an American spy who was embedded in the Nazi propaganda department during WWII (dont worry that is not a spoiler). The general themes are of whether ends can truly justify means, the questionable morality of doing "the right thing", and the very flimsy distinction between patriotism and nationalism. These are ideas that I agree with heartily as someone who grew up without a country to call home, but are much harder to accept for people who identify strongly with a particular country or place.
It's probably gauche to quote the entire chapter but one of my favourite passages is from "Adolf Eichmann and Me" where he talks to Eichmann while they're both awaiting trial in Israel:
quote:“May I ask a personal question?” I said.
“Certainly,” he said benignly. “That’s the phase I’m in now. This is the time for thinking and answering. Ask whatever you like.”
“Do you feel that you’re guilty of murdering six million Jews?” I said.
“Absolutely not,” said the architect of Auschwitz, the introducer of conveyor belts into crematoria, the greatest customer in the world for the gas called Cyklon-B.
Not knowing the man for sure, I tried some intramural satire on him—what seemed to me to be intramural satire. “You were simply a soldier, were you—” I said, “taking orders from higher-ups, like soldiers around the world?”
Eichmann turned to a guard, and talked to him in rapid-fire Yiddish, indignant Yiddish. If he’d spoken it slowly, I would have understood it, but he spoke too fast.
“What did he say?” I asked the guard.
“He wondered if we’d showed you his statement,” said the guard. “He made us promise not to show it to anybody until it was done.”
“I haven’t seen it,” I said to Eichmann.
“Then how do you know what my defense is going to be?” he said.
This man actually believed that he had invented his own trite defense, though a whole nation of ninety some-odd million had made the same defense before him. Such was his paltry understanding of the God-like human act of invention.
The more I think about Eichmann and me, the more I think that he should be sent to the hospital, and that I am the sort of person for whom punishments by fair, just men were devised.
As a friend of the court that will try Eichmann, I offer my opinion that Eichmann cannot distinguish between right and wrong—that not only right and wrong, but truth and falsehood, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, are all processed by Eichmann’s mind indiscriminately, like birdshot through a bugle.
My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody’s believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.
If there is another life after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, “Forgive him—he knows not what he does.”
This cannot be said of me now.
The only advantage to me of knowing the difference between right and wrong, as nearly as I can tell, is that I can sometimes laugh when the Eichmanns can see nothing funny.
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