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In 1961 Kurt Vonnegut published a short story called "Who Am I This Time?" about two shy people without much personality who come alive on stage as they become the char acters they play in amateur theatricals. The story explores a central theme in Vonnegut's work, the search for identity, in a gently humorous way that glosses over its more serious implications and provides a happy ending. The same year Vonnegut published Mother Night, a novel that explores the question of identity and its relationship to the theater in much greater depth. Both the short story and the novel were subsequently adapted for film. In addition to calling attention to the characters' search for identity, the question "Who am I this time?" raises two other issues: how Vonnegut presents himself in his fiction, and how his self-presentation, the implied author, is changed when his stories are adapted for film. Although several critics have pointed out that George Roy Hill's 1971 film submerges the self-reflexive quality of Slaughterhouse-Five, very little critical attention has been directed to Mother Night and Keith Gordon's 1996 film adaptation.1 Mother Night is arguably Vonnegut's most difficult and complex novel, and comparing it with Gordon's film highlights important aspects of Vonnegut's technique and also illustrates the difficulties inherent in bringing intricate works of fiction to the screen.
Beginning with the reissue of Mother Night in hard cover in 1966, Vonnegut has often written introductions for his novels in which he discusses his relationship to his work. These introductions create a persona for Vonnegut, but they also help him to define the implied reader for the work. The introduction to Mother Night describes Vonnegut's "personal experience with Nazi monkey business," strengthening the reader's sense of an implied author standing behind the first person narrative of Howard W. Campbell, Jr., and providing valuable clues about how Vonnegut would like his novel to be read. The introduction begins by announcing the "moral" of the novel: "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be" (v). This statement certainly fits the story of an American who pretends to be a Nazi in order to spy for the Allies and who becomes a notorious Nazi, at least in...