A couple of months ago I started a new series of posts called ‘Weekend Reads’ – lighter pieces to take the edge off the weekend. With the craziness of the election, and then the holidays that followed it, I have neglected them for a while. The great thing about holidays though is that they allow for some time for reading, so I am back with a review of Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (let’s see how this goes. I have been sick for the last 4 days, so this may be a bit jumbled, but that may actually fit Vonnegut’s style).
I’ve noticed I’ve taken a bit of a shine to modern cult literary figures recently, and Kurt Vonnegut is one of the best of the last fifty years (he died in 2007). Breakfast of Champions, the first Vonnegut I have read, was written in 1973 and is one of his best known pieces.
Breakfast of Champions follows the story of two main characters – Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover – and the events that lead up and follow their meeting. Trout is a science-fiction writer, and one who believes his work to be completely unknown within the community. The book follows Trout after he receives an invitation to speak at the Midland City Arts Festival, an invitation he accepts with some scepticism (as he does not believe anyone knows who he is).
Hoover is a wealthy businessman in the Midlands area, and is slowly going insane. The book follows his decent into insanity, which includes terrifying an employee at his Pontiac agency and getting in a fight with his mistress and secretary who he accuses of wanting him to buy a KFC franchise. Hoover’s insanity culminates in the meeting with Trout. Meeting Trout, he reads one his novels, the story of Now It Can Be Told. This book describes a universe in which only one character has free will (the reader of the novel) and everyone else is a robot. Hoover interprets this as a message addressed to him from the Creator of the Universe, and goes on a violent rampage injuring many around him and putting himself into a mental hospital. The meeting is transformational for Trout as well, with the rampage setting of a chain of events that takes him from an unknown author to a winner of a Nobel Prize.
You’re all potentially screaming ‘spoilers’ at me, and I have basically just described the entire story. But don’t, the story is not the unique or hidden part of the book. In fact, even Vonnegut outlines many of the details of the story’s ending right from the beginning of the novel. And that’s because it’s not the story that makes Breakfast of Champions so remarkable; it is the way it is told and the themes that run throughout it. This is not the kind of book where you are desperate to keep reading because you want to find out what happens next to the characters, but rather because through his unique style, Vonnegut brings out issues and themes that you would not expect from such a bizarre story (which it truly is).
Breakfast of Champions is not written in the way you would expect from a normal book. Most authors write in either the first or third person – either from the perspective of one of the one of the characters, or from a narrator who is completely disconnected from the book. Vonnegut manages both. The story is told through a narrator, but as a narrator that is not just involved in the story, but has control over it. In other words, the book is narrated through an ‘author’, and one who directly inserts himself into the story. The narrator (Vonnegut) describes this control in the following way:
I could only guide their (the characters) movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.
The book is told through a third person account, but that third person has direct influence in the book itself – much more literally towards the end of the piece.
This unique interaction between the narrator and the characters brings out an interesting exploration into the role story playing plays in our lives. Throughout the book, the narrator, who is himself a story-teller, explains that humans want to live their lives as if they are in a story. Our lives are told through a start, middle and end and we tell our life stories as if they are a novel. We connect through story-telling, and as the story-teller the narrator explores this idea throughout the book. In one of the most interesting ways, the narrator explores the lives of many minor characters throughout the book. With humans wanting to live their lives as if they are in a story-book, rulers, the narrator argues, have the capacity to discard the lives of ‘minor characters’. The narrator explains that he wishes he could explain the stories of the minor characters that appear through the books, but that he can’t. This is a lot like life, where in the history of our world, only the stories of a few – or the major characters – can easily be described. The others are tossed away.
If we are all destined to a role of major or minor characters therefore, a question arises – one which dominates the book – are we all just robots? We can see this theme in the story of Now It Can Be Told, the novel which sends Hoover insane. The theme is explored further when Hoover goes insane, in which the narrator excuses the people of the city for not recognising it because they act as machines:
Their imaginations insisted that nobody changed much from day to day. Their imaginations were flywheels on the ramshackle machinery of the awful truth.
Here, Vonnegut explores a cross-section of ideas. If our lives are just stories, we are all robots – a small part of story being told by someone else that we cannot control. We are not fully capable of controlling our world, with their being much greater forces – or ‘major characters’ at work. Vonnegut takes this to the extreme, taking away almost all sense of control for the characters and putting them in the hands of the narrator. In doing so however he asks interesting questions, how much has society programmed us in particular ways and how can we change that course of action if we want to?
Here Vonnegut tackles the concept of resistance, a way to ‘change the story’.
“Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”
When Trout realises what impact his book has had on Hoover, this is what he declares. If we are all robots, then the potential ‘cure’ for this is the one of ideas. With their capacity to spread quickly, Vonnegut explores the through that ideas are diseases, plagues that can both hurt and help our society. One of the perfect examples in the book is that of mirrors. Throughout the book, Trout explains how he calls mirrors ‘leaks’. In one scene he explains to a truck driver this idea. This driver then explains this to his wife, who then tells it to all of her friends. The idea spreads like a disease.
Ideas it may seem are the anecdote to the issues Vonnegut is exploring – a way to challenge the stories that dominate our lives. This is where Trout is such a valuable character – a man who in his own quiet way transverses many of the themes Vonnegut explores. His books deal with the issues that Vonnegut aims to explore and as the only character who really interacts with the narrator transcends the world of major versus minor character.
The best way to explain Breakfast of Champions is ‘odd, but brilliant’. Throughout unique story-telling, Vonnegut manages to explore concepts central to the human experience; the idea of free will, the explanation of life, and the purpose and spread of ideas. Whilst I may not agree with a lot of the conclusions that the narrator comes up with in the piece, the way Vonnegut explores the themes is truly worth the experience. It is a piece worth reading.