Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye
Blue Monday!: A Novel by Kurt
Vonnegut
My First Vonnegut Book.
We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane. So reads the
tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have n o doubt
whos really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness,
humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this
challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonneguts pure fantasy, it
lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-
Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to
read. Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous
jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut
acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character,
auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a
condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As
Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of C hampions coolly shows the
effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. Its not
much of a plot, but its enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on
America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only
ones that really count.
Personal Review: Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue
Monday!: A Novel by Kurt Vonnegut
When you pick up a Vonnegut novel, it's so easy to breeze through it that
you tend to underestimate the complexity of the ideas that are presented.
Vonnegut has a gift for making plain, declarative statements that are
seemingly simple, but which help you see the world in all its absurdity.
In "Breakfast of Champions," Vonnegut shows his mastery of this
technique. About guns: "Sometimes people would put holes in famous
people so they could be at least fairly famous, too." About speech: "Most
white people in Midland City were insecure when they spoke, so they kept
their sentences short and their words simple in order to keep embarrassing
mistakes to a minimum." About our economic system: "The planet was
being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being
manufactured was lousy, by and large." And so on.
These witticisms or social comments, or whatever you want to call them,
are strung throughout a book that moves at a frenetic pace. Ostensibly, it
follows the converging paths of obscure novelist Kilgore Trout and insane
businessman Dwayne Hoover. As Trout travels to Hoover's town, Midland
City, we learn about Trout's negative philosophy of life through the plots of
his novels, which inevitably end with the only innocent or good character or
positive human creation being senselessly killed. Hoover, meanwhile, is a
success in our real-world sense, and he even has some good personal
traits (such as hiring African American workers when others wouldn't). But
he has lost his grip on reality after his wife committed suicide, and he is
questioning the value of living. Near the end, Trout and Hoover collide, and
harm ensues for several people -- though those events also set of a chain
reaction that the narrator tells us will eventually lead to worldwide fame for
Trout and his negative philosophy.
Nonetheless, plot isn't as important as the observations that the narrator
and the characters in the novel toss continuously. While you're chuckling
at the statments, you're also re-evaluating how you see the world. Things
really are bad in a lot of ways, and it takes either blindness or an absurdist
sense of humor to come to grips with it. Vonnegut is shaking us up by
showing the absurdity in all its vividness.
The most remarkable thing about the book, from my perspective, is that it
was published in 1973, but it feels fully relevant today. Some of the
comments about environmental pollution, war-mongering, bland
consumerism, latent racism, random violence, etc., seem as if they could
have been written in a blog this week. The issues were on the cusp of
common consciousness in the early 70s when Vonnegut wrote "Breakfast,"
but he saw them clearly at the time, and he sent out a warning. Too bad it
hasn't been heeded.
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