![]() Similarly, in the 25 years after the fall of Nazi Germany, there were two great competing postmodern analyses of the war against totalitarianism: Thomas Pynchon’s challenging 1973 Gravity’s Rainbow conceived of World War II as the product of mass paranoia, while Kurt Vonnegut’s 1961 Mother Night saw it as an absurd consequence of mass schizophrenia (Vergilesov 91). ![]() Self-delusion and schizophrenia in Vonnegut’s Mother NightĮarly in the age of totalitarianism, English literature produced two great competing predictions of a dystopian future: Aldous Huxley’s 1932 Brave New World imagined a future where a materially sated populace medicated with the psychoactive drug soma had no will or desire to rebel, whereas George Orwell’s 1948 novel 1984 predicted one where compliance is assured from a materially deprived populace by constant surveillance and brutally violent “re-education” or elimination of those who differ from the regime of dictator Big Brother. ![]()
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