Intertextuality in Mother Night Megan Wenzel College

Allusions occur around us everyday. Neighbors make jokes about the most recent episode of The Voice, your best friend responds to your texts using only Taylor Swift lyrics, and your mom quotes Mean Girls nonstop. These allusions add depth to daily conversations; they would be meaningless if you hadn’t watched the latest episode or listened to the recent album. In the same way that allusions are used in daily conversations, authors use intertextuality in poems, novels, and other works of writing. These allusions are never random or accidental; the author carefully selects every word in their work of writing. Adding depth and complexity to the writing; intertextuality signifies a comparison the author wants you to make. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Campbell’s narrative is shaped in relation to prior texts through the use of direct quotations and related writings.

The most obvious allusion in Mother Night is actually the title itself, Mother Night. This personification of darkness was inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's play Faust. Within the editor’s notes of Mother Night, Vonnegut writes, “The title of the book is Campbell’s. It is taken from a speech by Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust” (Vonnegut xii). Spoken by...