How we cite our quotes: (Chapter.Paragraph)
Quote #1
It was dumb luck that brought us together. No conspiracy was involved at first. It was I who knocked on his door, invaded his privacy. If I hadn't carved that chess set, we never would have met. (11.23)
This story wouldn't be a story without Kraft's betrayal, and Campbell wouldn't have met Kraft if it weren't for the random urge to 1) carve a chess set, and 2) show it to someone. The mechanism of chance in this instance works through both creativity and the need to connect to another human. But doesn't that mean that there's something intentional about this meeting? Maybe the chance meeting is not so random after all?
Quote #2
I induced him to unlock them all by asking him if he played chess. There was dumb luck again. Nothing else would have made him open up. (11.25)
Coincidence alert. Of course, we don't really know if this is true. We're going along happily reading the novel, when this great moment comes. We're like, "Ooooooh—fated friendship." But if we step back, we can see that this could also just be the story Campbell tells himself. Why is he being so victim-blame-y towards himself? Weird.
Quote #3
'My name is Dr. Jones. I have a surprise for you,' he said. (14.24)
No joke: this sentence is super creepy in isolation. Okay, it's creepy in context, too. Campbell's life is about to get flipped upside down and turned inside out, because Jones is about to offer him a link to his past: Helga. Except—spoiler alert—it's not really Helga. You can't trust anyone or anything around here.
Quote #4
'No one knows everything,' he said. 'Did you know,' he said, 'that until almost this very moment nothing would have delighted me more than to prove that you were a spy, to see you shot?'
'No,' I said.
'And do you know why I don't care now if you were a spy or not?' he said. 'You could tell me now that you were a spy, and we would go on talking calmly, just as we're talking now. I would let you wander off to wherever spies go when a war is over. You know why?' he said.
'No,' I said.
'Because you could never have served the enemy as well as you served us,' he said. 'I realized that almost all the ideas that I hold now, that make me unashamed of anything I may have felt or done as a Nazi, came not from Hitler, not from Goebbels, not from Himmler—but from you.' He took my hand. 'You alone kept me from concluding that Germany had gone insane.' (18.85-89)
Mr. Noth, sir? What? This is one of those wink-wink moments in campy comedies when we get an audience laugh track to show we're all in on this joke that Campbell is a spy, and nobody knows, even though they're getting this close to guessing. What we're getting here is a story-within-the-story, and a little bit of camp. Noth makes the above observation in order to drive home the fact that Campbell was too good of a Nazi.
Even if Noth were to feel a shred of guilt about what he's done, he's going to pass the buck and put the blame on Campbell's broadcasts. Campbell is happy to let him: he blames himself for it all, even though the truth is complicated.
Quote #5
The details of his death came to hand by chance, in a Greenwich Village barber shop. I was leafing through a girly magazine, admiring the way women were made, and awaiting my turn for a haircut. The story advertised on the magazine cover was 'Hang-women for the Hangman of Berlin.' There was no reason for me to suppose that the article was about my father-in-law. Hanging hadn't been his business. I turned to the article. (20.2)
One aspect of the unique coincidences we often find in postmodern novels is that everything in the wider world is seen to reflect, affect, or somehow connect to the inner, private world of the novels' main characters. Only in this scenario would a random photo in a magazine at a barber shop relate the intimate details of Campbell's life. But maybe that's actually how things work in reality?
Quote #6
Resi told me later what the last things the man said were, and what the present for me was in the shopping bag.
'I'm one guy who hasn't forgot that war,' he said to me, though I could not hear him. 'Everybody else has forgot it, as near as I can tell—but not me.
'I brought you this,' he said, 'so you could save everybody a lot of trouble.'
And he left. Resi put the noose in the ash can, where it was found the next morning by a garbage man named Lazlo Szombathy. Szombathy actually hanged himself with it—but that is another story. (26.35-39)
This moment is beyond bizarre. We're not 100% certain we're supposed to look too closely at it, though. Here's our official take: what we're getting here is postmodern absurdism, though it still carries some weight, because Campbell actually is inadvertently responsible for another person's death.
Quote #7
'I found out she was missing the same day you did,' he said.
'How?' I said.
'From you,' he said. 'That was one of the pieces of information you broadcast that night.'
This news, that I had broadcast the coded announcement of my Helga's disappearance, broadcast it without even knowing what I was doing, somehow upset me more than anything in the whole adventure. It upsets me even now. Why, I don't know.
It represented, I suppose, a wider separation of my several selves than even I can bear to think about.
At that climactic moment in my life, when I had to suppose that my Helga was dead, I would have liked to mourn as an agonized soul, indivisible. But no. One part of me told the world of the tragedy in code. The rest of me did not even know that the announcement was being made. (32.20-25)
This is a spy's worst nightmare. We think. We're not spies. As far as you know, anyway, and we can't tell you one way or another for certain, so stop asking.
Anyway, this moment is pretty messed up. The notion of Campbell being two people at once is worth a pause. See, for the most part, he's in charge of this double life. He is the spy, he is the Campbell people see. All of a sudden, thought, he's strangely aware that he's no longer in charge. Actually, it dawns on him he never had control over his spy-self.
If his spy-self is fake, and his fake-self is fake, where is the real Campbell? Oh, yeah: he said that guy disappeared when Helga died. He was only real when he was in love, and living in that private country, population two.
Quote #8
'"This thing's been a building over the years," I told 'em,' said O'Hare. '"It's in the stars—" I told 'em, "in the stars that Howard Campbell and me meet again after all these years." Don't you feel that way?' he asked me.
'What way?' I said.
'It's in the stars,' he said. 'We had to meet like this, right here in this very room, and neither one of us could have avoided it if we'd tried.'
'Possibly,' I said. 'Just when you think there Isn't any point to life—' he said, 'then, all of a sudden, you realize you are being aimed right straight at something.' (43.32-36)
Yeah, O'Hare really buys into this Romeo and Juliet kind of love. Hate. We mean hate. This speech isn't really about Campbell, though: O'Hare's claims to an epic battle between the two have more to do with his own dissatisfaction with life than with any real concern with Campbell's crimes. Seems like Vonnegut is trying to say blaming it on the stars feels pretty appealing when you've got nothing else really going for you.
Quote #9
I don't like this one but use it if nothing else comes up:
'When I heard you were alive, I knew it was something I had to do. There wasn't any way out' he said. 'It had to end like this.'
'I don't see why,' I said.
'Then, by God, I'll show you why,' he said. 'I'll show you, by God, I was born just to take you apart, right here and now.' (43.61-63)
O'Hare has travelled clear across the country in order to hunt Campbell down, all the while telling himself that it had to be this way. O'Hare could have, we don't know, just as easily not done any of this, right? He could have just hung out at home with his bazillions of kids and taken a nap. And yet he chooses to trek over to NYC on this mission. Is the problem that his life at home has no meaning? And now he's looking for it in any quest he can make up?
Quote #10
So here I am in Israel, of my own free will, though my cell is locked and my guards have guns. (45.1)
Surprise, surprise. We're going along reading this novel, expecting that Campbell's going to be caught at any moment, since he's writing from jail, when lo and behold, he turns himself in. Now, he does say it's of his own free will, but he's been living in hiding for so long that maybe he pulls an O'Hare and just decides that this is how it has to be.