Kurt Vonnegut wrote about something he knew very well: World War II. He was a witness to the Bombing of Dresden, which took the lives of 25,000 people. The horrors the writer saw made him wonder what he would do if he had been born in Germany. Then he realized that he “would have been a Nazi, bopping Jews and gypsies and Poles around, leaving boots sticking out of snow banks”. Mr. Vonnegut also concluded that “when you are dead you are dead” and death could make us all even. This story was not about a battle between the pure evil and the absolute good; he showed that even initially good people were capable of committing crimes and vice versa.
The protagonist of the novel, Howard W. Campbell, Jr., was both a vicious Nazi and a spy, who was risking his life to communicate information. The interesting thing about him was that he knew about concentration camps, suffering people and other atrocities. However, he could live with that and continue with his work. Campbell was a combination of the good and the bad, it seemed that two absolutely different persons coexisted in him. Thanks to his schizophrenia, this man survived the war. His love life could not help but arouse readers’ interest. As long as he had Helga near him, everything was possible. He wrote poems, plays and a novel, because she was a source of his inspiration. When she disappeared somewhere in the Crimea, he stopped writing and that was the second moral of the story, “make love when you can, it is good for you”. One could never know where their peaceful kingdom of two would be destroyed by another war.
This novel was generously filled with the characters, who could be characterized as madmen. There were white supremacists and among their supporters were Jews and Afro-Americans, crazy Nazis, whose the only one concern was Jews and a failure-spy from the Soviet Unions, who drank heavily. But how would one characterize O’Hare? Was he a normal one? He was one of those, who didn’t want to take responsibility for his actions and continued to blame everyone he could think about? His idea of the pure evil and the absolute good showed how rather naïve and immature he was. At the same very time, Campbell’s story was a genuine tragedy of a lost man. Like many other young veterans, who returned from the brutal and horrible war, he belonged to the lost generation, whose representatives failed to return to normal life.
This novel should be read by young and old people, for it reminds us that a life is the most important possession, that both the good and the bad sides might have their reasons to behave in this or that way, that love and friendship should be never taken for granted. There might not be elaborated ideas, but there is no need for them, for this is the story about people who were placed in horrible, unpleasant, and difficult dilemmas.
