I don't know if this is the only place that he used it, but, from the review:
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Whether any sort of absolution can inhere in the fact that Campbell (a playwright of some skill) was, according to his word, only acting a part is the novel’s most engaging moral question. Considering his record as a Nazi propagandist, he claims “I can hardly deny that I said them. All I can say is that I didn’t believe them, that I knew full well what ignorant, destructive, obscenely jocular things I was saying”. Is it better to be an opportunistic demagogue or a fascist ideologue? Is it worse to believe lies or to willingly spread them? Campbell describes the totalitarian mind as a “snaggle-toothed thought machine”; a “system of gears where teeth have been filed off at random.” Thus, thinks Campbell, the fascist mind has periods of apparent functionality interspersed with periods of fearful lunacy. But this insight is tempered by the feeling that such knowledge is of little practical benefit, nor is it good in itself. Some minds are made one way; others, another. So it goes, as they say.
The reader is told a tale by a master propagandist, and is therefore under no obligation to believe a word he says. Only three people believe that he was an agent working for the Allies, and they are nowhere to be found. One may be inclined to think that truth, particularly historical truth, is not a matter of concensus, but Howard W Campbell Jr., finds that, placed against the postwar need for a particular type of justice, his story, cast into doubt by his aknowledged genius for demagoguery, is of little interest. He offers only his continued survival – “my unbroken, lily-white neck – as evidence for the truth of his tale.
In his Introduction, Vonnegut notes several morals that his novel demonstrates. One is that “we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” Another is that “when you’re dead you’re dead.” Only those that survive can tell stories, true or otherwise. The stories of virtuousic liars like Arpad and Campbell get told. Those of the “briquets” do not.
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= new reply since forum marked as read
