Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut's "explosive meditation" of a novel Breakfast of Champions (1973) is subtitled Goodbye Blue Monday!. It is peppered with simple, childlike illustrations drawn by the author, and it tells a crazy-quilt story that eventually defies the constraints of the novel format itself. All of this seems to constitute an act of self-liberation, and it is: Vonnegut overhauling his creative world, breathing deeply and toying with the very nature of the novel. The title echoes the claims of a well-known American breakfast cereal, and it crystallizes the irony of the author's vision. Breakfast of Champions is one of his greatest successes, a freewheeling and hugely entertaining meditation on modern American life that draws in some definitive figures from the author's imagination, such as the hapless sci-fi writer Kilgore Trout and the wealthy Elliot Rosewater, and finally the author himself. With a magic that contrasts the white-hot spell of his previous novel, Slaughterhouse Five -- and virtually deconstructs the novel itself -- Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions trips through American mindset of the early 1970s, its deadpan irony satirizing the party line on just about everything, from sex and racism to the Vietnam War and the meaning of the American dream. One of Vonnegut's most enduring creations, Kilgore Trout is a science fiction writer who has not known much success as Breakfast of Champions begins. To his amazement, he is invited to the Midwest, to participate in the Festival of the Arts in Midland City, at the insistence of the crazy but wealthy Eliot Rosewater. Trout is on a collision course with one of Midland City's more successful businessmen, a Pontiac dealer named Dwayne Hoover, who happens to be slipping into insanity (too many bad chemicals in his system). Reading a Trout story sends Hoover completely around the bend. The novel itself then follows him, as Vonnegut's inquisitive imagination divines the freaky chaos beneath the careful surface of American life. Writing in The New York Times Book Review, Nora Sayre noted that "in this novel Vonnegut is treating himself to a giant brain-flush, clearing his head by throwing out acquired ideas, and also liberating some of the characters from his previous books ... This explosive meditation ranks with Vonnegut's best. "