Essay Questions

Campbell advocates for his innocence by saying that he worked as an American spy during the war, not just as a Nazi broadcaster. However, this claim is never proven. Does it matter whether Campbell was really a spy? Or do his actions make an ulterior motive pointless?

Campbell raises an interesting conundrum: at what point in collaborating with a violent system, with the goal of bringing it down, does someone become as bad as the system itself? He might have saved lives by passing on American messages, but his broadcasts raised favor with the Nazis, acted as propaganda, and led to thousands of people dying. It can be argued that it doesn't even matter if he is a spy: his actions led to such atrocities that being a spy doesn't absolve them, since any good he did doesn't negate the harm he caused.

Campbell's death by suicide is an unexpected ending to the book. Why might he do it? What does his suicide add to the book?

Campbell's suicide is a tragic end to a tragic story, where he feels that that this is the best option and avoids him being executed, because he has no way to prove his innocence and his work as a spy. There's no resolution, just like there's no resolution in war, which adds to Vonnegut's message of the horrors of war. Campbell will never have a peaceful, satisfying end to his life, because the trauma he went through and possible war crimes he committed will always overshadow that. Instead, he has a choice between execution and suicide, and he chooses the lesser of two evils, as people are often forced to do in the horrors of war that Vonnegut describes. His death also leaves the reader with ambiguity about his allegiance - he dies without us ever knowing whether he was a spy or not, which further contributes to Vonnegut's message that it doesn't matter whether Campbell was a spy or not, because his actions were atrocious either way.

After the disappearance of his wife Helga, Campbell's relationship with his sister-in-law, Resi, becomes complicated: there's attraction there from both sides. Why is Campbell attracted to his sister-in-law? How does it add to the themes of the book?

Campbell is attracted to his sister-in-law because she is a stand in for his wife. She looks enough like Helga, and exists in proximity to Helga, so Campbell is attracted to her by proxy because he cannot have his wife. This attraction by proxy adds to the novel's theme of the horrors of war, because war strips people of their individual identities and the morals that they may have had beforehand. War has destroyed the differences between Resi and Helga, and has destroyed Campbell's morality in differentiating between the two of them.