Why go back to his old name?
I liked the movie but its not a very realistic idea that he would just go back to his old name. Why risk it? Vonnegot should have been a little more creative in the way that he is 'found out'.
shareIts a little more complicated than that, the book sort of explains it in more detail.
shareYeah, in the novel Howard Campbell, Jr. assumes his true name again because he has realized that there is almost no risk in doing so. He lives alone and incommunicado and can pit the syno-name down to chance with the rare person that actually cares who Howard Campbell is/was. He is only revealed by the machinations of his best friend and alcoholic Russian spy, George Kraft/Iona Potapov, who hopes to influence Campbell's situation in the States such that he will be forced to flee the country, whereupon the Russians would intercept him and parade him as the sort of unmoral and odious creature they claim America is glad to harbor.
Oh! Found the quote:
" I came to New York under an assumed name. I started a new life, in a manner of speaking, in my ratty attic overlooking the secret park.
I was left alone--so much alone that I was able to take back my own name, and almost nobody wondered if I was the Howard W. Campbell, Jr.
I would occasionally find my name in a newspaper or magazine--never as an important person, but as one name in a long list of names of war criminals who had disappeared. There were rumors of me in Iran, Argentina, Ireland... Israeli agents were said to be looking high and low for me.
Be that as it may, no agent ever knocked on my door. Nobody knocked on my door, even though the name on my mailbox was plain for anybody to see: Howard W. Campbell, Jr."
Kurt Vonnegut is much clearer than I.
I think it's part of his tragedy: He is considered a war criminal but even worse, he has been forgotten by most people. I think for a writer, being forgotten in one's own lifetime might the worse of the two.
Nobody's looking for a puppeteer in today's wintry economic climate.