Breakfast of Champions--A Book Review

At the beginning and throughout the story, Vonnegut spoils the suspense by telling you what will happen before it happens. The plot could be boiled down to a quarter of the book's length, or less, but he chose to include frequent tangents expounding on seemingly irrelevant details. For example, the story follows Kilgore Trout, a flop science fiction author and guest speaker at an arts festival in Ohio. One of his stories (which Vonnegut summarizes) is about aliens and critiques modern culture's obsession with the automobile. Another is all about an ad agency's sabotaging an alien world's morale by manipulating their people's idea of their “national averages for this and that” (175). These themes never resurface in the plot itself, but are nonetheless intriguing when considered in the context of the characters themselves. A typical author will include details about a character's life which help the reader understand that character's actions and reactions as the plot unfolds. Their development is very deliberate in that way. Because I know such and such about this character, my understanding of that character's actions and feelings are largely directed by the author. Not only that, often authors include certain details so that the reader may understand or react in a specific way. Harry Potter feels at home at Hogwarts ipso facto he is an orphan. Typical authors illicit emotional responses from their readers. Vonnegut is unique because so many of the details about his main characters do remarkably little in helping us understand their role in the story. It's as if his characters have complicated, robust lives of their own beyond the confines of the plot; he can introduce them to us without being preoccupied with the significance of his details.
Vonnegut is both flippant and poignant.
“He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war.”
Vonnegut is both irreverent and pessimistic.
“I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge...What was the apple which Eve and Adam ate? It was the Creator of the Universe” (205). Later that very same chapter, “As for myself: I had come to the conclusion that there was nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide” (225).
Vonnegut can be sensitive but mostly he is obscenely abrasive.
“When Dwayne treated Harry as though he were invisible, Harry thought he had revealed himself as a revolting transvestite, and that he was fired on that account. Harry closed his eyes. He never wanted to open them again. His heart sent this message to his molecules: 'For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy is dissolved'” (116).
“...the white people got smart quick. They didn't want N****** in their town, so they put up signs on the main roads at the city limits and in the railroad yard... A N****** family got off a boxcar in Shepherdstown... They moved into an empty shack that night. They got a fire going in the stove and all. So a mob went down there at midnight. They took out the man, and they sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence” (246).

At times, his voice in Breakfast of Champions gets too vulgar and disrespectful for my taste, or perhaps I just blush too easily. For the most part he is bizarre and common at the same time, like a trusted, quirky union worker buddy who gets you to think good and hard about human nature or politics or culture but who also carries on conversations with the vending machine.

The chicken drum series

Some peeps are raising chickens and some island rastafs are making timbales!

She used goat skin for the head. Charlie, who showed me the island in the first place, took the drum to sell for 105 Belizean dollars ($53).