Breakfast of Champions

BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS is mainly a vehicle to showcase Kurt Vonnegut’s uniquely gentle satirical style. The plot is chaotic and pretty silly—in his preface, he tells the reader that the novel is “a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast”; the setting is hopelessly mundane and depressing—Midland City; the characters are deeply flawed and mostly recycled from previous works; and the narrative is filled with asides and crude drawings that seem cute but unnecessary. As my aside, Vonnegut once advocated for the elimination of the semi-colon, a convention I obviously have trouble adhering to.

So why are people attracted to this work? Mainly it is because of Vonnegut’s show more narrative voice. His worldview was often quite pessimistic, but his observations were always refreshing, spot on and unfailingly amiable. He addressed most of the absurdities and evils of American culture with characteristic deadpan humor. One can’t help but wonder what he would have made of the bizarre presidential campaign of 2016. Clearly, 50 years later, people seem to be waking up to some of the things that bothered Vonnegut in the 70’s, but whether we are up to the task of changing them seems to be doubtful.

There are far too many examples in the novel of Vonnegut’s jaundiced but accurate perceptions to cite them in any detail. You need to just let them flow over you as you read. Invariably, these observations provoke smiles, laughter and frequently downright awe. His scope was indeed prodigious, including racism, corporate greed, inequality, war, environmental degradation, materialism, sex, mental health, politics, history as myth, futility, derangement, free will, the inadequacy of fiction as a vehicle for change, and so it goes.

Vonnegut uses a hopeful metaphor of mirrors as “leaks” to a more rational reality. Notwithstanding his pessimistic view of our current reality as a bizarre wonderland, not unlike what Alice found on the other side of her looking glass, Vonnegut seemed to persist in a belief that kindness to other humans can be redemptive. show less

This is a playful dark humor book that meanders about, making interesting observations about everything that the author feels is wrong with the world. At times, it’s a fiction version of a John Stewart rant. It is impressive that within so much blackness, a weird kind of hopefulness peeks out from behind the curtain. When you notice and describe awful things about reality, I suppose, you are at least illustrating that we are able to see that the awful things are awful, which suggests that the human spirit can indeed do something better. This book does not explain itself, at times. It depicts racism and sexism, for example, in images that make those two words pointlessly simplistic. This book could be banned for using the N word, for show more example, because it doesn’t go out of its way to couch each usage in a way that makes it clear the narrator knows the word is bad. The narrator doesn’t give a shit about mentioning slavery or rape in “just the right way” so as not to be offensive—the book depicts real things that real people really feel, all with the tone of Douglas Adams. Your job as the reader is to make the final step yourself. This isn’t a feel good book. It’s a downer disguised. Recommended. show less

A terrific read. A witty satire on the world, America, and its contents. He managed to break the fourth wall in a novel without being a know-it-all and annoying guy. I always try to slow down every time I read Vonnegut because I don't want his book to end. Let me put it into his style: a book is made of dead trees that are processed on a machine. This book is dead trees with clever words written on it.

Amerika’yı, insanların gerçek hayattan bu kadar uzak olduğu, tehlikeli ve mutsuz bir ülke yapan şeyi anlayınca, hikaye anlatmayı bırakmaya karar verdim. Hayat hakkında yazacaktım. Her insan, bir diğeriyle tam olarak aynı ölçüde önemli olacaktı. Bütün gerçeklere eşit ağırlık verilecekti. Hiçbir şey dışarıda bırakılmayacaktı. Başkası düzen getirsin kaosa. Ben tam tersine düzene kaos getirecektim, ki bunu da yaptım bence.

Başarılı oto galerisi sahibi Dwayne Hoover, şiddetli bir orta yaş krizine girmek üzere. Farkında değil, ama değeri bilinmemiş bilimkurgu yazarı Kilgore Trout kendisine doğru ilerliyor. Çok geçmeden karşı karşıya geldiklerinde, onları çok önemli bir misafir show more bekliyor olacak. Şampiyonların Kahvaltısı, zenginleşen Amerikan toplumunun zihnini cinsellik, siyaset, savaş ve daha fazla tüketimle bombardımana tutan kitlesel medyayı alaya alan karnaval niteliğinde bir şaheser.
#vonnegut #tüketimtoplumu #kitleselmedya #delilik #şiddet

“Voltaire geri dönmüş de plastikten, tek kullanımlık bir Amerika’nın dehşetiyle dalga geçiyor gibi.”
THE SUNDAY TIMES show less

The story Vonnegut tells in Breakfast of Champions isn’t the most compelling, but his commentary on America is blistering, and just as dead-on in 2022 as it was in 1973.

First and foremost, he is upfront about the two monstrous sins in America’s past, genocide and slavery, and the hypocrisy of the country never fully owning up them, yet passing itself off as a virtuous beacon of freedom. How fantastic is it that nearly 50 years ago he was casting the “discovery” of America in 1492 in a very different light, calling it “the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them [other human beings].” “Color was everything,” in America, he says, meaning including the present day, and “The chief weapon of the sea show more pirates was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”

Vonnegut also comments on capitalistic greed and the country’s “every man for himself” attitude, resulting in extreme cruelty to other people and a destruction of the environment. There is a fossil fuel company called Rosewater in the book that strips the land and treats workers like animals, which reminded me of the real-world Duke Power. He points out the unfairness in the distribution of wealth, including those like Nelson Rockefeller who “owned or controlled more of the planet than many nations…his destiny since infancy.” On these points and others (racism, the patriarchy, commercialism) the book is still incredibly relevant today, which is as depressing as it is impressive.

Vonnegut also reveals a fair amount of pessimism about humanity as a whole, through his character Kilgore Trout believing that “humanity deserved to die horribly, since it had behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.” He points out mankind’s inherent and dangerous tribalism when he says “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, on order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with friends, in order to express enmity.” He was 51 when he wrote the book, in the period of life when it does get difficult to remain sanguine about the human race.

The book starts incredibly strong, but it meanders as it plays out, and Vonnegut inserting his own illustrations often didn’t add much. However, the references to his personal life, including his mother’s suicide and his own struggles with mental health, were touching though. All in all, definitely a good read.

Just one more quote, on America:
“The undippable [American] flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto [E pluribus unum] might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.” show less

I finished reading this book a few days ago and while I like to try to write my commentary soon after I have finished reading this book, others things (such as my monthly Friday Night Magic – and despite the fact that I absolutely suck at Magic – I still like to go) sort of got in the way. Anyway, if there is one thing that I can say about this book is that by the end of it it had COMPLETELY DONE MY HEAD IN. I was actually wondering around Melbourne looking at all the machines that the creator had created simply to respond to me – such as the begging machines that sit outside of the railway station because they make more money demeaning themselves (and it is tax free income) than actually doing something productive, and the show more whining machine that sits opposite me at work who all day bitches and moans about how much he hates his job but probably has no idea what it is like to be unemployed.
Anyway, before I get on to what I am talking about with regards to these machines I have to say that this is one of those very unique books. In a way it takes the concept of modernism to the absolute extreme. Where as a lot of modernist writers write about the ordinary, Vonnegut goes one step further and writes about one can considered to be the boring. He writes in very short sentences, not overly descriptive, but will talk about things that are incredibly irrelevant, like the interstate that goes past the new Holiday Inn. Further, he breaks up the story (which is a pretty ordinary story about how two people meet and the result of that meeting) with pictures of things that are probably irrelevant to the story as a whole. For instance, he talks about an asshole, and the draws a simply picture of an asshole (which looks like a asterix).
With the drawings and the pictures one sort of wonders if he is trying to write a children's book, but considering the concepts that he explores and talks about in this book I highly suspect that he is not. It feels that in a way he is writing down to the average person in the United States and suggesting through the style of his writing, that the intelligence and intellectual ability of the average American is not that much greater than that of a child. In fact, this book is incredibly scathing of American society, and the pointlessness of the book (it doesn't go anywhere, and while the two main characters end up switching roles at the end, they never get anywhere, nor do they grow, nor do they accomplish anything) is a scathing attack on the pointlessness of the modern American society.
In fact, what Vonnegut does is that he rips away the veil that covers the faces of most Americans (and Australians as well) and shows us what really is. For instance, at the beginning of the book, he rewrites the story of the founding of America by white man by indicating (no actually he says outright) that they never actually found anything because millions of human beings had already found the continent and where living there quite happily until a bunch of sea pirates (meaning the Pilgrims) came along and took it away from them.
In fact Vonnegut leaves nothing out in his scathing attack at American society, and some of his attacks are quite straight forward, such as his attack against the obsession with wide open beavers that American men have (and also goes into a side note on how the term beaver came about), and others are much more subtle. One of the ways he does this is by telling us about the stories that Kilgore Trout, the science-fiction writer who is one of the main characters in the book, wrote. One of these stories is about a planet where the sentient race were automobiles and that this race had destroyed their planet, however another alien visited this planet and went to Earth to warn them, however they stole the idea of the automobile from him and killed him instead of listening to his warning.
Another of the stories satirises our obsession with sex and pornographic films. Sex is a pleasurable thing, but Vonnegut considers that this obsession with watching people have sex, and explicit sex, on film to be absurd. To put this absurdity in context he writes about a planet that would make the dirtiest movies that anybody could think of, and a visitor from Earth goes and watches one of these movies and discovers that the entire movie involves people eating food. In fact the eating of food in these films is incredibly detailed and explicit. As such, what Vonnegut is suggesting is that watching two people have sex, and getting excited over the fact that two people are having sex, is just as absurd as watching somebody eat an apple, or a steak, or even a bowl of mashed potato. Eating food is incredibly pleasurable, but we don't react when we watch somebody eat food, so why do we react when we watch people having sex.
I would probably put this book into the absurd, in the same sense that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and Waiting for Godot are absurd, however the book explores the absurdity of what our society has become. For instance, Vonnegut gets to the point where he describes the dimensions of the penises of every single male character in his book (and the dimensions of some of the female characters in the book as well) and at one point the dimension is so huge that he suggested that most of this guy's penis existed only in the forth dimension. In a way it is an attack against our obsession with pointless things. The size of a character's penis adds absolutely nothing to the character, in the same way that numerous authors would add details to their characters which added nothing to that character.
There is actually quite a lot that I could write about this book and haven't even touched upon, such as the concept of race. For instance, Vonnegut describes that this idea of discriminating against somebody based upon the colour of their skin is as absurd as describing the dimensions of somebody's penis. However, this happens, and Vonnegut is very blunt about it. He actually goes one step further with this absurdity with regards to race by introducing a Nigerian into the book, who is actually more well respected in the story than the average Afro-American because he is not an Afro-American, he is a Nigerian with a medical degree.
Now, I should finish off with this discussion about the machines because, well, I said that I would talk about it. The story that this relates to is the story that makes Kilgore Trout famous, and that is the a story that is actually a letter from God to the reader in that God explains that the reader is the only person in the planet with free will and that everybody else is simply a machine that reacts to the person with free will. In fact the billions of machines that are created are created just in case they may, some time in the future, interact with the reader. This story sends the other main character insane, and he ends up going on a rampage which results in a lot of people suing him and sending him onto Skid Row (and I haven't even mentioned this idea about 'bad chemicals' that Vonnegut talks about).
I remember sitting at a table in one of my friend's houses one when a couple of other friends had come over. My friend said to one of the girls there that he understood her view of the universe, and that is that outside of her immediate perception nothing existed, and that existence only existed when she could actually perceive existence, which meant that before she was born there was nothing, and once she dies, the universe returns to nothing. This is the absurd end of individualism, in the same sense that the idea that the reader is the only entity with free will is also an absurd end of individualism. show less

I never understood people who say Vonnegut is funny. He's never made me laugh out loud, and I never suspected he tried too hard. Funny? No. Clever? Sure. But he's no comedian.

Vonnegut's real talent, to me, is explaining things simply, concisely and elegantly. He's like a good teacher. Able to say it in the way that the whole class both understands and gets it. I get that that style might be infuriating to some, but it never feels like he's talking down to you. Sure, I know how the American national anthem goes. But now that you mention it, it is pretty preposterous.

This is a book about physical bodies. It is incredibly thematically dense with this. It's also a book about race, and as good as any white american could write it. The links show more from humans as machinery, to humans literally used as human machines, to the fact that their skin colour was the only factor that assigned them to this role are all incredibly deftly done. Everything comes back to this physicality - Vonnegut's and Trout's aging, Dwayne Hoover's bad chemicals, even the constant dick jokes.

And tying into this, it's also a book that is desperately asking us to think of other people as more than just machines. That the danger of thinking of yourself as the only aware person in the universe is something propagated by the art we're fed, and is a natural way to think about things, a way of thinking to fall into. That we are the only people who feel real pain, who feel the ecstasy of pleasure and happiness fully, that we are the only ones that really matter. That we are the main character in our story. But we're not. We're just another band of unwavering light. And we should probably go about life seeing all the other bands. show less