Breakfast of Champions

Kilgore Trout is a widely published, but ignored and virtually invisible writer who is invited to deliver a keynote address at a local arts festival in distant Midland City. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy businessman who owns much in Midland City, but is becoming increasingly mentally unstable. The novel is achronological and frequently shifts focus between Hoover and Trout, as well as supporting characters like Wayne Hoobler, a man who wants to work under Hoover, and Kurt Vonnegut himself, who appears as the author of the book, having power over the world and his characters' actions. "The novel's structure is a simple one", as Jerome Klinkowitz has written, "yet it employs simultaneously evolving plots from different times and spaces."[1]

The novel starts with Vonnegut writing in the first person; he notes that in the book he expresses a suspicion that human beings are machines, and states that "when I create a character for a novel, [I say] that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day." Vonnegut says he's going to purge himself of mental clutter, and, throughout the novel, can be found examining and refuting disparate concepts, from the 'discovery' of the new world in 1492 to euphemisms for genitalia.[1]

When Trout arrives in Midland City, he piques the interest of Dwayne. A confused Dwayne demands a message from Trout, who hands over a copy of a novel he brought for the festival. Dwayne reads the novel, which purports to be a message from the Creator of the Universe explaining that the reader – in this case Dwayne – is the only individual in the universe with free will and that everyone else is a machine. Dwayne takes the novel as factual and, now believing other people to be machines, goes on a violent rampage, severely beating his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody. While Trout is walking to the now-postponed festival after Dwayne's rampage, the Vonnegut character approaches Trout. He tells Trout he is the Creator of the Universe; that he is only telling Trout this, out of all his other literary creations; and that he is "freeing" Trout in the same way "Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves". The Vonnegut character disappears and somersaults "lazily and pleasantly through the void", hearing Trout cry to him in the last words of the novel, "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"

Suicide, free will, mental illness, and social and economic cruelty are dealt with throughout the novel. In the preface, Vonnegut states that he tends "to think of human beings as huge, rubbery test tubes, too, with chemical reactions seething inside." As with Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), the nature of free will is called into question, in this case by considering mankind as biological machines, and physical measurements of characters are often given when they are introduced.

He attributes the mental illness of Dwayne Hoover and society at large to an abundance of "bad chemicals" in the brain which, when combined with bad ideas, formed "the Yin and Yang of madness." This idea, that humans are no more than machines, is contained within the novel Kilgore Trout gives to Dwayne Hoover. Both Trout and Vonnegut realize the power of bad ideas, with Vonnegut remarking how "natural it was for [people] 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." The view of humans as biological machines, initially accepted by Vonnegut, is counteracted by Rabo Karabekian, the abstract artist who suggests "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

The novel is critical of American society and its treatment of its citizens, many of which Vonnegut writes "were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country." He focuses largely on race, the poor, and the destruction of the environment, criticizing the hypocrisy of a land that claims to be based on the principles of freedom having been founded by people who "used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines." The incidents in the life of Wayne Hoobler, a black resident of Midland City, are frequently contrasted with those of the similarly named Dwayne Hoover, emphasizing the aforementioned impact of race.

The novel is simple in syntax and sentence structure, part of Vonnegut's signature style. Likewise, irony, sentimentality, black humor, and didacticism, are prevalent throughout the work.[2] Like much of his oeuvre, Breakfast of Champions is broken into very small pieces, in this case separated by three dots. Vonnegut himself has claimed that his books "are essentially mosaics made up of a whole bunch of tiny little chips...and each chip is a joke."[3] Characteristically, he makes heavy use of repetition, in this case starting many sections with "Listen" and ending many with "And so on."[4]

The novel is full of drawings by the author, intending to illustrate various aspects of life on Earth, are sometimes pertinent to the story line and sometimes tangential. They include renderings of an anus, flags, the date 1492, a beaver, a vulva, a flamingo, little girls' underpants, a torch, headstones, the yin-yang symbol, guns, trucks, cows and the hamburgers that are made from them, chickens and the Kentucky Fried Chicken that is made from them, an electric chair, the letters ETC, Christmas cards, a right hand that has a severed ring finger, the chemical structure of a plastic molecule, an apple, pi, zero, infinity, and the sunglasses the author himself wears as he enters the storyline.

Breakfast of Champions makes heavy use of metafiction, with Vonnegut appearing as the narrator/creator of the work, explaining why and how he makes this world as it is, changing things when and as he sees fit, and even being surprised by events.

The novel also makes use of intertextuality with Vonnegut's other works. In addition to Kilgore Trout, characters from other Vonnegut books which appear here include Eliot Rosewater and Rabo Karabekian. Rosewater was the main character in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965) and a minor character in Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), while Karabekian later became the main character in Bluebeard (1988). Hoover's secretary, Francine Pefko, previously appeared in Cat's Cradle (1963), where she performed secretarial duties at General Forge and Foundry, in Ilium, New York. (Pefko also appears in "Fubar," a story released posthumously in Look at the Birdie.) Vonnegut uses the name "Khashdrahr Miasma" for a minor character, in reference to a character in Player Piano. The vicious guard dog, Kazak, was Winston Niles Rumfoord's pet in The Sirens of Titan (1959) and Selena MacIntosh's guide dog in Galápagos (1985). Many of Midland City's inhabitants reappear in Deadeye Dick (1982), which locates the city in Ohio.

Breakfast of Champions spent a total of 56 weeks on the New York Times bestsellers list, 28 weeks for the hardcover edition and 28 for the paperback.[8] The novel received a negative review from the New York Times,[7] as opposed to positive reviews from TIME and Publishers Weekly. Vonnegut himself was unhappy with the novel, and gave it a C grade on a report card of his published work.[9] However, it remains one of Vonnegut's best-known and most-influential works.[2]

In 1999, the novel was made into a film of the same name, starring Bruce Willis, Albert Finney, Nick Nolte and Omar Epps. The movie was widely panned by critics[10] and never went into wide release.[11]

• "Book Review: Breakfast of Champions, Or Goodbye Blue Monday". The New York Times. May 3, 1973.
• Horwitz, Carey (April 15, 1973). "An Interview with Kurt Vonnegut Jr". Library Journal.