Breakfast of Champions
Kurt Vonnegut (1973)
“A novel in which the author enters his own book, sets his characters free, and dismantles America with crayon drawings and the vocabulary of a child.”
At a Glance
Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy Pontiac dealer in Midland City, Ohio, is going insane. Kilgore Trout, a destitute science fiction writer, is traveling cross-country to attend an arts festival. When Dwayne reads Trout's novel — which argues that everyone except the reader is a robot with no free will — his madness detonates. He goes on a violent rampage, injuring eleven people. Meanwhile, the narrator reveals himself as Kurt Vonnegut, the god of this fictional universe, who has come to Midland City to set Kilgore Trout free from his authorial control. It ends with Vonnegut crying and Trout screaming 'Make me young.'
Read full summary →Why This Book Matters
Published in 1973 to massive commercial success and sharply divided critical opinion. Some reviewers called it self-indulgent; others recognized it as a landmark of American postmodernism. It is now considered one of the essential American novels of the 1970s — a book that dismantled the conventions of fiction in order to dismantle the fictions America tells itself. Its influence on metafiction, graphic novels, and the use of illustrations in literary fiction is immense.
Diction Profile
Deliberately anti-literary — kindergarten vocabulary deployed against adult horrors. Short declarative sentences. Definitions of common objects as if for aliens.
Extremely low by design. Vonnegut avoids metaphor and simile in favor of literal description