Mother Night Themes

Is it getting hot in here?It sure is. Although most of the steamy business discussed in Mother Night is situated within the confines of a loving marriage, there's still some risky business going on...

Why does it hurt so much more when someone we trust turns out to be the bad guy in our lives? From large-scale betrayals, like high treason, to the destruction of friendships, treachery is majorly...

Patriotism. A good thing? A bad thing? A neutral thing? We don't know. But what we do know is that patriotism is definitely a bad thing when it gets too big for its britches and starts deciding tha...

You may have noticed that in Mother Night, the boundaries between patriotism, nationalism, and religion get pretty blurred. Take a look at any Nazi rally, and you see people so zealous about their...

Campbell is a writer—a poet and a playwright, to be exact. He's also writing a tale of his failures. Although Mother Night is an account of just how much this dude has messed up, Campbell still g...

Some things are meant to be, some things are totally random, and other things are all on you. At least we think so.Mother Night plays up the conflicting notions of chance, destiny, and agency in a...

Folks, you're probably not surprised that in a novel about World War II, war is a theme.Mother Night is all about the aftermath of war: it's set fifteen years after the end of WWII. We don't get a...

Oh, boy. Folks, this is where it gets real.Western civilization has a long history of theorizing history—and a lot of that theorizing came right out of Germany. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, for...