Kurt Vonnegut's BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS

Some comments on
Breakfast of Champions
Marek Vit

"Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."(p.221)

Introduction

Breakfast of Champions; or Goodbye Blue Monday is Kurt Vonnegut's seventh novel. He wrote it in 1972, as he himself says, for his fiftieth birthday. It is Vonnegut's own parody of himself and his works. "The various themes and mannerisms that have animated the earlier novels are seen here in a grotesque, cartoon version of themselves," (Todd). It is a confrontation of tragedy of America brought forth by Vonnegut's sensitivity to tragedy (Uphaus), where Vonnegut "seems to rub middle America's nose in the sheer ugliness of life." (Merill)

The story

Breakfast of Champions is a story of "two lonesome, skinny old men on a planet which was dying fast,"(p.???). One of these two men is Dwayne Hoover, a "fabulously well-to-do" Pontiac Dealer, and the other is Kilgore Trout, an "unknown" and unsuccessful science fiction writer. These two characters are destined to meet in Midland City and Kilgore Trout's book Now It Can Be Told is destined to turn Dwayne Hoover into "homicidal maniac".

How the novel is written

The novel attacks many things: slavery, racism, commercial greed, jingoism, ecology, capitalism, imperialism, overpopulation etc., all of these aimed precisely at modern American society. Vonnegut "brings a remarcable air of discovery to these themes, the pretense that no one has quite seen before the stark outlines of our hypocrisy," (Todd). Vonnegut is "impolite" in his writing about these matters. He was taught to this impoliteness when he was a kid (p.2) by Phoebe Hurty -- the person this novel is dedicated to.

The whole book is written in quite familiar style which was used in Vonnegut's previous novel Slaughterhouse Five. The style can be defined by one line from it: "If accident will" (Vonnegut 1969, p.2). Breakfast of Champions also has the vague image of absolute chaos. Vonnegut denounced books that "make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, that it has lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end," (p.209). But chaos is not only a way in which Vonnegut writes, it is also what Vonnegut writes about.

		As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become
	more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions
	made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity
	them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for
	them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results:
	They were doing their best to live like people invented in
	story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so
	often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short
	stories and books.
		Why were so many Americans treated by their government
	as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-
	sues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated
	bit-part players in their made-up tales.
		And so on.
		Once I understood what was making America such a
	dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with
	real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write
	about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any
	other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness.
	Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I
	would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.
		If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens
	not in the literary trades will understand that there is no
	order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to
	the requirements of chaos instead.
		It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am
	living proof of that: It can be done. (p.209-210)

Thus has been created a book resembling a children's encyclopedia. Is is written in simple language, short paragraphs and short sentences. It is acompanied by crude pictures drawn by the author himself. Philip Stevick has pointed out that "Vonnegut's principal strategy is to contrive the voice of a naif, which in his case is the voice of a fifty-year-old naif." The use of this voice, according to him, has two risks: 1) "it will pall and weary the reader with its limitations of tone," and 2) "the naive observations will finally seem to represent the mind of the author, which is to say that the book is apt to make Vonnegut himself appear simple-minded." But on the other hand, Stevick says, "the possibilities of the naive voice are considerable, and Vonnegut exploits them all: being naive, the narrator has no sense of structure or priority and thus can include anything, as indeed he does, moving in a few pages through matters of eschatology and teleology, cornball manners of the Midwest, irrelevant statistics, perverse sexuality, washroom graffiti, and automobile sales techniques. The satiric possibilities of the naive voice, moreover, are classic, and Vonnegut directs his innocent voice at American guile and idiocy with considerable effect. He explains, for example, with the same dull ingeniousness that he uses to explain the bucket of fried chicken, the function of the body bag in gathering together the fragments of a soldier killed in action." (Stevick)

Why the novel was written

As I already mentioned, Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut's fiftieth birthday present to himself. He seems to want to celebrate his birthday like Tolstoy or Thomas Jefferson -- releasing their serfs. Vonnegut, too, wishes to set free his slaves, his literary characters. But it's not the only thing he intends to release. Vonnegut also wants to throw out all the junk from his head. "I think that I'm trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago." (p.5)

The purpose of Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut's re-invention and re-incarnation. "And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again." (p.218)

I would like to conclude this part of my essay with following excerpt from Robert W. Uphaus's article:

	Breakfast of Champions is a kind of children's book (complete
	with drawings) in which Vonnegut tries to sort out innocence and
	experience. He himself must appear front and center, for the book,
	finally, is about Vonnegut's sense of awareness. Thus we watch
	Vonnegut almost ritually stalk his own biographical past while
	he also pursues his former characters down the steamy streets of
	Midland City; all this is done to establish that what he once
	created he now wishes to destroy. Destruction, of course, is often
	a prelude to regeneration, but before Vonnegut will be able to
	regenerate his fiction, to his own satisfaction, it appears that
	he will have to sort out his own past. In a sense, then, this book
	does not simply frustrate the reader's customary pursuit of meaning
	in his own fiction. The reader of Breakfast of Champions is thus
	being asked to participate in, or at least observe, Vonnegut's own
	self-analysis. (Uphaus)

References:

Merill, Robert	   "Vonnegut's 'Breakfast of Champions': The Conversion of Heliogabalus"
	- in Modern Fiction Vol.XVIII, No.3, pp.99-108, 1977

Stevick, Philip    in Partisan Review Vol.XLI, No.2
	1974; Partisan Review, Inc.

Todd, Richard      in The Atlantic Monthly
	Boston, Mass.: May 1973; The Atlantic Monthly Co.

Uphaus, Robert     "Expected Meaning in Vonnegut's Dead-End Fiction"
	in Novel: A Forum of Fiction winter 1975; Novel Corporation

Vonnegut, Kurt     Slaughterhouse-Five
	New York: 1971; Dell Publishing Co.	

Vonnegut, Kurt	   Breakfast of Champions
	London: 1992; Cox & Wyman Ltd.

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Last modified: March 11, 2002