Drinking Deeply from The Breakfast of Champions

Nothing in that first paragraph matters in the least. It’s just a story about my desk right now.

Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions has lots of stories like that. They also don’t matter. That’s the point.

Let’s start over. Tracing the development of Vonnegut’s thought through his novels is fascinating. Consider the slice included in the Library of America’s Kurt Vonnegut, Novels and Stories 1963-1973. It begins with Cat’s Cradle, which argues that life is pointless and meaningless and just one thing after another. Then comes God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which argues that since life is pointless and meaningless, we might as well love our neighbors. Then Slaughterhouse-Five, a devastating description of the fire-bombing of Dresden in which Vonnegut enters the pit of despair. After such knowledge, what forgiveness?

What comes next is Breakfast of Champions, which is a broken Vonnegut just hurling what remains of his psyche onto the page. Since it is Vonnegut, there are some amusing bits. But, the nature of the book is found it its title: The Breakfast of Champions is not Wheaties; it’s a martini.

You think that is a harsh assessment? It’s more generous than Vonnegut’s later self-assessment. He graded his own novels. Cat’s Cradle and Slaughterhouse-Five were A+. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was an A. Breakfast of Champions? C.

You want a plot summary? Good luck. Kilgore Trout, a science fiction author who shows up in Vonnegut’s earlier novels, gets invited to a convention in Midland. Dwayne Hoover owns a car dealership and a bunch of other retail establishments in Midland. In chapter 1, we are told they will meet. Eventually they do. The only reason to pick that out of all the stories in this book as the plot is that it is the one story that is actually mentioned a few times. Turn to a random page, and you’ll almost certainly get a totally unrelated story.

The stories seem to overlap, but that is only because they are all taking place in the same novel and Kilgore and Dwayne are in multiple stories. We get, for example, a lot of summaries of Kilgore Trout’s stories, which is a funny in a way. Vonnegut has a bunch of ideas for stories, but rather than write up the stories, he pretends that Kilgore Trout wrote the stories, and then Vonnegut provides a sketch of the Kilgore Trout story which Vonnegut could have just written. The whole novel is like that; people drop in for a page or two and you get their back story and then they vanish and are never heard from again.

If you are looking for a nice linear novel, just move along. The mess of a plot is enhanced by the frequent insertion of a bunch of crudely drawn pictures. If you are imagining the pictures are an important key to the story, you haven’t been paying attention. Opening the book at random, we get a picture of a Holiday Inn sign and on the next page a picture of a lamb and a few pages later two pictures: one of a blazer a monkey wore in a Trout story and the other a sign in front of a diner that says “Eat.” Two pages later, two pictures of trucks, one of which says “Pyramid” on the side and the other says “Ajax” on the side and then…do you want me to go on listing pictures?

What is this mess of stories all pretending to be a single novel? Vonnegut gives us a hint late in the novel in an authorial interlude:

As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them 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.

Vonnegut is talking about You, Dear Reader, and Me. We really do think of our lives like we are a part of a story. Stories have plots that cohere and themes that mean something. They also have to end somehow and you really want to think your life has a progression toward that end, don’t you?

But, Vonnegut isn’t done with you yet. He wants to tear apart your ability to imagine you are a character living in a story. He doesn’t even want you to have the dignity of thinking that highly of yourself.

When Kilgore Trout meets Dwayne Hoskins in a hotel cocktail lounge, there is suddenly a third important character in the bar. Vonnegut himself, sitting in a corner. Now Vonnegut doesn’t call himself Vonnegut. He gave himself a penname in the Preface, but when he shows up in the cocktail lounge, he repeatedly lets us know that the characters are doing exactly what the author of the novel decides they should do. This isn’t just breaking the fourth wall, having the author address the audience. It is shattering the fourth wall into a bajillion fragments. To what end?

In the cocktail lounge, when the promised meeting occurs and Kilgore Trout finally does meet Dwayne Hooper (and remember, we have been waiting for this scene since the first chapter of the novel), the entire interaction between them is this: Dwayne, who had been slowly going insane, walks up to Kilgore and asks for the message, then grabs a novel that Kilgore wrote and happens to be holding, asking “Is this it?” A bewildered Kilgore says “Yes.” Dwayne wanders off and reads Kilgore’s novel, which takes remarkably little time because conveniently enough the author of the book had sent Dwayne through a speed reading course.

The novel Dwayne read was a message to the reader that the reader was the only person in the world with free will. Everyone else is a robot. Dwayne goes on a rampage attacking the people he now knows are robots. Ambulances come. And so on.

That undoubtedly does not make you want to read this story. But, here is where Vonnegut is being really meta. Breakfast of Champions is itself a novel in which there is only one character with free will—the author. Everyone else is a robot, doing exactly what the author wants the characters to do. To rub it in, the novel ends with the author talking with Kilgore Trout, revealing himself as Kilgore’s Creator and telling Kilgore that he will henceforth be free. But of course there is no possible way Kilgore Trout can be free. He has no ability to have free will, no matter what the Creator says.

And you, Dear Reader? Remember that story in which you think you were living? Who is the author? You? A Different Creator? Are you the only person with free will in a world of robots? Or are you one of the robots? Or is your story really not a story at all, but just a bunch of people with free will crashing into one another and whatever happens, happens? Vonnegut won’t let you have any of those answers. He won’t let you have an answer at all.

Breakfast of Champions is really just some sort of uber-nihilism. Don’t ask me what “uber-nihilism” means—I just made up the phrase and I have no idea what it means either, but it is the perfect description of this novel. To try to make sense of the book is exactly the sort of thing the book is mocking you for trying to do.

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