Author: Kurt Vonnegut

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback

Pub. in: May, 1999

ISBN: 0385334206

Pages: 303

Measurements: 8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches

Origin of product: USA

Order code: BA00448

Other information:  

Breakfast of Champions was a book that Kurt Vonnegut wrote for himself as a present for his 50th birthday. Having reached half a century of this life, he had decided that it was time to let all of his repeated characters (characters that showed up in several different novels of his) finally go. Vonnegut combines satire, insanity, chaos, and literature into an amazingly fast-moving book that is hilarious, disturbing, wild, and undeniably true. It depicts modern life from a distance, as if explaining it to an extraterrestrial. Through this viewpoint, the reader can realize how many of the things people do are ridiculouse.

The book follows the odyssey of an oddball science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout. The reader follows Kilgore from his melancholy childhood in Bermuda to the sleazy underside of New York City, and eventually to a dangerous encounter with a Midwestern car dealer called Dwayne Hoover, a man on the brink of going insane. Vonnegut weaves through the lives of various characters, yet still to bring more focus onto Hoover and Trout and the path that follows. The descriptions and backgrounds that hover around each character give Breakfast of Champions an unexpectedly smooth plot where everything comes together in the end. That effect causes an explosive, satisfying moment of thought after the reader finishes the last page of the novel. There is clearly a message, but the exact message is not clear; it's definitely open to interpretation.

This entire book is a journey through America and its problems, laying bare prejudices such as racism, classism, and the like. He exposes the lack of a cohesive culture in America, and he does so in both blunt and subtle manners, unfolding not just a story of a car salesman's insanity, but more importatly, taking the opportunity to use Kilgore Trout's journey from Cohoes to Midland to illustrate the emptiness of American life.

Without a cohesive culture, Vonnegut shows that American life is a listless, hollow experience. Even the main story of Car salesman Wayne Hoover's insanity is subordinate to this theme, as his mental unbalances often display the same lack of values and feeling in the American Experience.

For example, he stops at a diner on his way to Midland City, and he is suffering from a symptom of Schizophrenia that makes him repeat the last word someone else says. He engages in conversation with a waitress there, who fails to notice that he is repeating the last word of every sentance she speaks. She doesn't notice because she doesn't pay attention to what he says. She, like everyone else in her town, like everyone else in her country, expects nothing more than empty small talk, and gives Wayne Hoover typical automatic responses to everything he says. The theme of humans being like robots, and living like robots figures prominently in the story, as mentioned in the novels of Kilgore trout, Vonnegut's alter-ego. This book is a warning to Americans that we are wasting away.

(quoting Savana Jazmin, USA)

Target readers: General readers

Better with Cat’s Cradle :

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