Now It Can Be Told: "Dear Sir, poor sir, brave sir: You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire Universe who has free will. You are the only one who has to figure out what to do next--and why. Everybody else is a robot, a machine. Some persons seem to like you, and others seem to hate you, and you must wonder why. They are simply liking machines and hating machines. You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn't you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn't meant to be reasonable." "And so on..." These are the opening lines of a fictional novel which drives a fictional man of unwell mental health over the edge at the same time as Kurt Vonnegut himself steps into the schizophrenic imaginings of his own fictional world to speak to the fictional author of that fictional novel quoted above and offer him the one thing he's never known in his fictional existence, independence and freedom of will. Kurt Vonnegut is brilliant in a totally insane way, and Breakfast of Champion is totally insane. In a brilliant sort of way. "The expression "Breakfast of Champions" is a registered trademark of General Mills, Inc., for use on a breakfast cereal product. The use of the identical expression as the title for this book is not intended to indicate an association with or sponsorship by General Mills, nor is it intended to disparage their fine products." These are the books I've read three times or more: 1984 (George Orwell), The Hunt for Red October (Tom Clancy), The Great Train Robbery (Michael Crichton), Fight Club (Chuck Palahniuk), and Till We Have Faces (CS Lewis). This is the second time I've read Breakfast of Champions, now, and I am quite confident it will join the others in the not too distant future (whenever I can find a nice edition from a bookstore). I should note that I'm counting the audio book and specifically that I highly recommend it. The print version has simple pictures (mostly of an ironic nature) and a unique layout and paragraph technique that only works when you can see it with your eyes. But the audio edition is read by Stanley Tucci (!!!) who is the king of audio books and has the absolute most perfect voice inflection to capture Vonnegut's zany existential weariness. Because the pictures are so basic and universally understood, simply referring to them invisibly has the same effect ("This is a pyramid." "This is a lemon." And so on.) Either way you consume it, the writing style is beautiful in it's slick repetitions and recurring gags. ("Look." "And so on." "Fabulously well-to-do.") Look. The plot is simple, it's the execution that's nonsensical. Kilgore Trout is an undiscovered schlock sci-fi writer of some 100+ novels and 2000+ short stories, usually printed as filler material in dirty magazines. Dwayne Hoover is a "fabulously well-to-do" owner of a Pontiac dealership ("medium-priced" cars), and is about to meet Trout and be psychologically infected by one of his sci-fi stories (see above) and go even crazier than he already is, believing he is the only being with free will in a world of machines. The novel is divided in two, following both Trout's and Hoover's separate journeys toward their inevitable encounter, splattered with what Vonnegut refers to as all the junk in his brain preceding his 50th birthday. There are countless digressions, distractions and meandering commentaries on all the various ridiculous details of life in America on planet Earth, written vaguely from the perspective of an outsider, an alien perhaps, in the future, who sees those old Earthlings like huge rubbery test tubes with chemical reactions inside. Descriptions of America and mundane everyday American cultural objects are depicted as distant and foreign and strange. Saying what a lemon is, or a pyramid, or a beaver, produces a fun detached self-awareness. Though Trout and Hoover are the main players, Vonnegut relishes in the exploration of almost every background object and bit player they stumble across, filling them in with random and quirky backstories. Nowhere is the implication of this more apparent than in the final climax when Hoover, infected by the ideas in Trout's novel, decides that it's okay to kill and maim all the human "machines" around him and Vonnegut takes us through a whirlwind tour of unfocused digressions through the lives of all these people as if they had been the main characters all along. Everyone is the center of their own stories. At first it seems incoherent and difficult to fit together until you realize that's exactly what he's exploring. By giving attention to so many bystanders and background characters at the height of the novel, he deconstructs the notion of a singular protagonist at the center. Vonnegut is waging a war against solipsism. Solipsism is one of the most important words in the English language during the (Dis)Information Age (aka, these days right now, the days in which you're reading this blog post). Solipsism is basically when you think you are the only entity who is for sure real, and everyone else is suspect. Maybe everyone around you is a robot or hologram or puppet. You are the center of the universe. Only you are free. Maybe they are there for your pleasure, or entertainment, or as a test. Maybe the Creator of the Universe is observing you curiously to see how you will handle the various scenarios in life he is putting you through. It is selfish and egocentric. It is arrogant and naive. It is sociopathic and myopic and self-indulgent and sometimes the symptom of various mental illnesses. It is also the inevitable way in which all too many people begin to behave after spending too much time on the internet in their parents' basements subjecting themselves to media overload (these days at least). When all you watch is artificially constructed media like videos games and TV and movies, you get a little too familiar with the notion that you are the only one who is real. The only one who matters. The rest is entertainment. The lines between these constructs on TV and the people of real world begin to diminish because your exposure and engagement within the real world has also diminished. Vonnegut himself even begins to suspect that he is part of the problem as an author of popular media. He goes so far as to write, "Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun story-telling." Breakfast of Champions almost didn't exist for that reason. He almost quit writing entirely after the runaway success of Slaughterhouse-Five finally put him on the map. And even when Breakfast did come out, there was the prevailing notion that this was it. These were the last ideas he was clearing from his head before vanishing from the media landscape. Thank God that did not happen (he went on to write many more works). But you can see the logic, and you can feel him batting for the fences as he writes Breakfast of Champions. He finds at least a little room for almost all his disparate opinions and frustrations and though many readers might (and do) complain about the ensuing clutter, there is a common denominator loosely linking them all together... Listen: This is what it's about. Okay, I'll be the first to admit, this novel defies singular summation. In the first place, it barely exists as an isolated text. Like watching Avengers Infinity War, it riffs on themes and subjects from across multiple independent stories. It continues threads of ideas begun somewhere else and not completed until the end of his career. Vonnegut reuses characters and ideas he's played with before, sometimes only briefly, seldom consistently, to comment on everything from suicide to communism, sexual politics, existentialism, social justice, race relations, insanity and the notion of free will in a commercialized society. It's scattershot with sub-textual goldmines. It's a cracked diamond of literary intertextuality through which there are thousands of facets and angles to observe. But on the other hand, a text is a text. From beginning to end, it says something, and says it on its own terms, regardless of what came before, during or after. Whether intentional or not, the collection of these ideas into a singular story constitutes a complex but singular message. And for all the meandering commentary on modern society, that final conclusive message is solipsistic futility. (...In my opinion!) There is a lesson here. When Hoover "learns" he is the only real human and everyone else is a machine, he goes on a killing spree (mostly just hurting people with mixed results). All the other social commentary in the book is about earthlings hurting other earthlings for trivial reasons. But in the context of the violent solipsistic climax, we can easily infer that the harm which humans do to each other on a global scale may often be in direct proportion to their tendency toward that same solipsistic egotism. I now use the word solipsism less literally and more as a matter of hyperbole. As someone begins to think of themselves as more important and everyone else as less important, their casual willingness to hurt those people also increases. They are beginning to act just a little solipsistic. It's not a common word. The common vernacular might be more akin to self-righteous or self-centered. Careless. Heartless. Lacking in all empathy for the suffering of those around you. But I didn't just say the message was a critique of solipsism, I said it was a message of solipsistic futility... Vonnegut enters the story. After a few less than sneaky first person pronouns, he eventually announces his arrival at a bar, behind a pair of mirror-lensed sunglasses. He discusses casually the nature of his control over the fictional reality, causing certain things to happen here and there and overtly matching character details to those of his own real life. He makes Hoover's wife commit suicide, as his own mother did in real life. He gives Trout his father's varicose veins. And so on. And then, as Leo Tolstoy freed his serfs at the time of his death, Vonnegut confronts Trout (the sci-fi author) and offers him freedom. Free will. Think about that for a moment through a lens of solipsism. Think about it specifically from the point of view that the more solipsistic you become, the more harmful you usually become to those around you. Now realize that Vonnegut, in a fictional world that exists only on the paper he typed it on, filled with characters that only exist because he typed them into existence, this Vonnegut actually is the only real person (in the scene, anyway). His solipsism is actually literal (like literally literal, because he really is real and everyone else really is just fictional). And in the midst of an actual literal and accurate solipsistic scenario, he chooses to offer freedom! He doesn't choose to indulge himself and hurt them like a dictator. He chooses to set them free. He demonstrates a loving God who offers freedom (for good or ill) to the human race of his creation. He demonstrates the difference between solipsism of ego and solipsism of fact. When driven by ego it is a matter of insanity which inevitably hurts others. When driven by fact it results in benevolence. Listen: No matter how much you fancy yourself the most important center to the universe, you are nothing but a nutcase if you don't use that power benevolently. But here is the futility that underscores what could've been an upbeat and hopeful moral conclusion: When Vonnegut sets Trout free, Trout pleads only, "Make me young again!" Even in the midst of such a benevolent gift from the "creator" of his universe, Trout's response is despair and selfishness. I suspect there is much debate about the implications of this strange and sad coda. But without trying to put too fine a point on it, I sense a futility in it. Trout is not ready to be set free and neither are we. We might very much prefer to be agreeing machines and buying machines and working machines and American machines. The centers to our own stories. Hurting those around us who aren't as real as we are. Perhaps this is why the novel closes with a drawing of Vonnegut himself. Crying at all the solipsistic futility of it all. Conclusion: Instant favorite. All the stars. Would read again. All the existential angst and social commentary is fun, sure, but the story is also just bonkers. I've read a lot of negative reviews from people who just don't connect with it. Smart people. It's not for everyone. Some of the irony and satire--I won't say it's too smart for some people, because it's not at all subtle, and I highly doubt even a dumb person would miss it--it's just so blatantly abrasive and in your face that some people just can't enjoy it on a purely aesthetic level even, and I think that's totally valid. Also, some of that bonkers stuff is sexual and political and off-putting. I get that too. I kinda like the abrasiveness of it, even when I don't agree with a particular choice, and I find the obvious Show-Don't-Tell inversion technique quite effective even if it undercuts its own subtext. But really, for me, the main selling point (beyond the afore-blogged essay on solipsistic futility), the part that really makes this just a superficially straight-up enjoyable read for me, is the slick rhythmic callbacks and self-referential quotes and especially, especially the zany 70's sci-fi schtick. These are a couple of Trout's science fiction stories. Listen: There's the one where an Earthling named Delmore Skag, a bachelor surrounded by large families, found a way to reproduce himself in chicken soup by shaving living cells from the palm of his right hand and mixing them with the soup, and exposing the soup to cosmic rays. The cells turned into babies which looked exactly like Delmore Skag. Pretty soon, Delmore was having several babies a day, and became famous as a family man. He hoped to force his country into making laws against large families but instead the courts and legislatures passed stern laws against the possession by unmarried persons of chicken soup. And so on. Then there's also the one where all the life on the planet Lingo-Three resembled American automobiles. They had wheels. They ate fossil fuels. But they weren't manufactured, they laid eggs containing baby automobiles. Space travelers visiting Lingo-Three learned the automobile creatures were becoming extinct because they had destroyed their planet's resources and atmosphere. The automobile creatures hoped the travelers would carry at least one of their eggs to another planet where an automobile civilization could begin again. But the space travelers were only an inch high and their ship was smaller than an Earthling shoebox. So instead they kept the memory of these creatures alive until they reached Earth. One of the travelers was attempting to preach this message of inadvertent self-destruction in a bar in Detroit but was so tiny that nobody paid any attention until a drunk automobile worker mistook him for a kitchen match and killed him by repeatedly striking him against the underside of the bar. And so on. There's tons of these peppered throughout. You can find a few in other Vonnegut novels, but the character of Trout gets by far the most attention here in Breakfast. Vonnegut once said, "If you paraphrase a science-fiction story, it comes out as a very elegant joke, and it’s over in a minute or so. It’s a tedious business to read all the surrounding material. So I started summarising [them], and I suppose I’ve now summarised 50 novels I will never have to write, and spared people the reading of them." What a guy. Thanks Kurt. And so on. Be Sure to Like and Retweet! And Feel Free to Check out Some of My Other Reviews: Player Piano by Vonnegut Galapagos by Vonnegut Islands in the Stream by Hemingway East of Eden by Steinbeck
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