Review of Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

I recently completed Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. My non-critical reading of the novel is one of entertainment and admiration. I would recommend this novel for fans of postmodern literature and science fiction.

One of the themes of the book that profoundly struck me was the mirrored instances of characters, the writer, and the reader by extension playing God in others' lives as well as God playing God in the lives of men. Vonnegut truly makes the reader question the existence of God, or perhaps not the existence, but the forms that God and gods can take in our lives. The largest and overarching God figure in the novel is the fictionalized writer, a fictionalized Vonnegut. The reader learns as he progresses in the novel, that our novel does have a narrator that also plays a character in the story. It is true that this narrator is as omniscient in nature as a narrator can get, since the narrator is the writer-- the creator of all characters and the determiner of events that take place. Our narrator is there at the climax of the novel in a voyeuristic fashion, that is in order to see the mayhem he has created. Vonnegut is breaking conventions in the postmodern style which he so profoundly influenced and helped to usher in after the end of World War II. The writer is mirrored by another God character in the novel: Kilgore Trout. A red flag shot up in my mind when I learned that Trout was a writer (like our fictionalized writer) that deeply influences the life of Wayne Hoover. When Hoover reads Trout's work of fiction (in letter form) and takes it as fact in the final escalation to the climax of the book, Trout becomes Hoover's God-- the writer of the letter informing Hoover that he is the lone member of the human race with free will and that all other humans are merely machines, following their directed and predetermined path.

Vonnegut plays with the idea of free will juxtaposed with predestination throughout the book. In the end, I believe that he leaves the argument to the reader. Vonnegut and his postmodern chronies tend to pose far more questions than they ever answer. Through most of the second half of the novel, after the reader is aware of the intrusive authorial presence, it seems that Vonnegut is making an argument for predestination, but at the very end, even the fictionalized writer of the tale, now taking place in the events of the story, seems to have lost control. The author appears to have lost control over his catalytic character, Kilgore Trout. In fact by the end of the novel, it seems that all characters had free will except for Wayne Hoover, who is destined for his dark path because of the insanity inducing "chemicals" in his body. Once Hoover reads Trout's novel (speed reads for the sake of the story), he is destined for his destructive path.

The novel kept me vastly entertained with humor (for example, the previously mentioned example of Hoover having conveniently learned to speed read to quickly further the plot). Vonnegut's humor truly comes through in his illustrations found throughout the book, including one of my favorites, an drawing of an asshole that very closely resembles an asterisk. I believe that Vonnegut's illustrations give us a look into Vonnegut's perception of the world. The illustrations are often of things that often might seem pointless or mundane, but Vonnegut taking the time to draw the items out for the reader truly gives off a unique perspective.

Finally, I believe that this novel is extremely ahead of its time in the fact that it addresses many of the ideas about the Earth's environment that have become popular is just recent years.  Vonnegut is blatantly commenting on the mistreatment that mankind does to the planet. Vonnegut wrote Breakfast of Champions in 1973 in an era where many scientists believed that global cooling was occurring. Another issue that frequently pops up in the novel is racism. While, the civil rights movement may have been winding, if not winded, down at this point, Vonnegut obviously has still observed racial discrimination in the Midwest United States, where the novel is set and the region that Vonnegut called home.

Overall, it was an entertaining and fairly easy read. Cat's Cradle remains my favorite Vonnegut by far. I look forward to reading my next Vonnegut, which will most likely be Jailbird.