Breakfast of Champions

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast Of Champions. United States. Delacorte Press: 1973.

After many people have suggested this book to me, I decided to read "Breakfast of Champions" by Kurt Vonnegut. Most recommendations are based on the fact that this is "my style of humor." This book is a dark, satyrical look at the workings of America and the branch of insanity that is self-derived. The novel takes place during the late sixties, when it was written, and reflects the racial and international tension that was going on at the time. This novel helped me understand the crude and vulgar cohesion that is applied in Vonnegut's brain.

Kilgore Trout, an unsuccessful author, is suddenly and suprisingly called to the Festival for the Arts in Midland City, Ohio. Throughout his travels across the United States, we find that his unpublished and uncredited works, which tell of wonderous astronomical stories, are only published in pornography, who use his literary works to interpret pictures of "wide-open beavers."

While he is travelling, an aging car salesman starts to experience the early stages of schizophrenia. After his wife commits suicide, by drinking Drano, he descends into depression while the world goes crazy around him. After reading one of Trout's stories, he loses all sanity and, while taking the book literally, begins to attack all of his friends and collegues.

I thought that this has been the most enjoyable novel i have read since Catch-22. Vonnegut's trademark dark humor helps the book keep a light-hearted view on a man's plunge into madness. The author uses the novel as a basis for attacking all that is accepted in America, from pop culture to politics. I recommend this book to anyone with a sense of humor and a minor interest in the way people work.

This book cleverly deals with the ideas behind insanity and madness. The story is told from two perspectives: one from a peniless author and one from a successful, but insane, car salesman. It seems inevitable, with his wife's death and the tragedies that affect him, that the used car salesman, Dwayne Hoover, would lose his mind.

Each plotline and symbolic item has repetitive representation in the book throughout and all of the psychological aspects of the characters are well defined.

Vonnegut also wrote the controversial war books, "Cat's Cradle" and "Slaughterhouse V," which showcased his simplicity and dark humor. Vonnegut wrote 14 books using similiarly broken up logic and plotlines that meet together to form a story. He is also notorious for throwing theories of story structure and chronology out the window, yet still developing a great book.