Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

How do I begin to describe Breakfast of Champions? It has, by far, one of the strangest plots I’ve ever come across – but then that’s Vonnegut for you. The protagonists are Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who’s featured on several of Vonnegut’s novels, and Dwayne Hoover, a car dealer from the fictional Midland City who’s on the verge of losing his mind. It’s Hoover’s encounter with one of Trout’s novels that precipitates his final mental collapse: the novel he reads is about a man who discovers he’s the only real human being in a world populated by machines whose every action is done for his convenience. Unfortunately, Hoover comes to believe that this is true of himself, and this loss of his ability to acknowledge the humanity of those who surround him has disastrous consequences.

Breakfast of Champions traces Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover’s paths until their doomed encounter. The results of Hoover’s breakdown are an illustration of the importance of remembering that every other person on the planet is every bit as real as you are; of the importance of empathy, that is to say, and of being kind. Along the way, Vonnegut also comments on the constructs of mental health and mental illness, on history and the environment, on art, and on all the creative ways human beings have of belittling, excluding, and murdering one another, not to mention of disregarding all other living creatures. All this is intermingled with humour, with the author’s very own illustrations, and with his inventive attempts to break the fourth wall.

I enjoyed Breakfast of Champions, but it’s probably my least favourite of all the Kurt Vonnegut novels I’ve read to date. There’s nothing wrong with it, really, and there isn’t even anything about it that’s all that different from Vonnegut’s other novels. But I guess I was in the mood for a gentler sort of read, and there’s a certain harshness to the novel’s tone that made me understand, for the first time, why other readers might feel alienated by Vonnegut’s writing. In the end, Breakfast of Champions won me over, but it did it mostly on credit – it won me over due to the influence of all the other Vonnegut books I’ve read and loved in the past.


But let me tell you what I did like: I liked that for all its harshness, there’s a lot of kindness behind the book, and there’s a sensibility at work here that I can really identify with. The narrator of Breakfast of Champions sounds like someone explaining all our human folly to an alien life form that came by a hundred years from now and found only the charred remains of our civilization and of everything we destroyed to support it. The explanations are made as simple as possible, in a way that makes all the ways in which humans have gone wrong acutely clear and embarrassing.

What keeps this from ever sounding superior or smug, though, is the fact that there’s so much tenderness behind it all. Breakfast of Champions has the same “I despair of you, my fellow humans, but I still love you” tone that I so love about Vonnegut’s other novels. He comes across as someone who could easily have become a misanthrope, and yet didn’t; as someone who saw his fellow humans at their very worst, and yet continued to love them and believe in them. And there’s something about this that really moves me.

I also loved all the things Breakfast of Champions had to say about individuality, art, and compassion. As I was saying earlier, Vonnegut keeps breaking the fourth wall, and he does so by inserting himself into the story as an observer who’s almost powerless to prevent the horrible situation he wrote his characters into; as someone who acutely feels the pain they’re about to experience. For example:

I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created. Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. I was not eager to be recognized. The waitress lit the hurricane lamp on my table. I pinched out the flame with my fingers. I had bought a pair of sunglasses at a Holiday Inn outside of Ashtabula, Ohio, where I spent the night before. I wore them in the darkness now.

This might sound gimmicky when taken out of context, or like he’s being meta merely for the sake of being meta, but the fact is that it absolutely works. All these interludes make the author’s sympathy for his characters almost palpable; and, more importantly, they make the humanising effect of art really stand out. Art teaches us empathy; it makes us see the “unwavering band of light” behind each human being. And that’s what I appreciate the most about it.


Final reason why I liked Breakfast of Champions: it reminded me of Douglas Coupland, which is actually true of several of Vonnegut’s novels. I suppose it’s the other way around, really, only I’ve been reading Coupland since I was a teenager, while Vonnegut was a more recent discovery. I can’t quite put my finger on what their novels have in common, but I know I love them for some of the same reasons.

I wish I’d read Breakfast of Champions when I was in a different sort of mood, as I’m sure I’d have appreciated the humour, the tragedy, and the narrative complexity even more then. But I can always revisit it some day in the future, right? Don’t be put off by my sounding appreciative but not truly enthusiastic: I think this is really a case of It’s Not You, It’s Me. I still love you, Mr Vonnegut. May our next meeting be more felicitous.

Interesting bits:

And here, according to Trout, was the reason why human beings could not reject ideas because they were bad: “Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express friendliness. Enemies disagreed with enemies, in order to express enmity.
“The ideas Earthlings held didn’t matter for hundreds of thousands of years, since they couldn’t do much about them anyway. Ideas might as well be badges as anything.
“They even had a saying about the futility of ideas: ‘If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.’
“And then Earthlings discovered tools. Suddenly agreeing with friends could be a form of suicide or worse. But agreements went on, not for the sake of common-sense or decency or self-preservation, but for friendliness.
“Earthlings went on being friendly, when they should have been thinking instead. And even when they built computers to do their thinking for them, they designed them not so much for wisdom as for friendliness. So they were doomed. Homicidal beggars could ride.”

Bunny was sent away to military school, an institution devoted to homicide and absolute humourless obedience, when he was ten years old. Here’s why: He told Dwayne that he wished he were a woman instead of a man, because what men did was so often cruel and ugly.

His situation, insofar as he was a machine, was complex, tragic and laughable. But the sacred part of him, his awareness, remained an unwavering band of light.
And this book is being written by a meat machine in cooperation with a machine made of metal and plastic. The plastic, incidentally, is a close relative of the Gunk in Sugar Creek. And at the core of the writing meat machine is something scared, which is an unwavering band of light.
At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light.
My doorbell has just rung in my New York apartment. And I know what I will find when I open my front door: an unwavering band of light.

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