Tawdry underside of the American dream

Kurt Vonnegut savagely pulls the curtain aside to show the 'new world' at its barest and exposes its rapacious desires.

Those who’ve never read Kurt Vonnegut and decide to dive into his output by choosing Breakfast of Champions as a starting point, are likely to be confronted by what on the surface seems to be an absurdist satire on the United States and that country’s social and political history. Oh, and a text interspersed liberally with crude black-and-white sketches of — among other things — tombstones, multi-trailer trucks and body parts.

“This book is my fiftieth birthday present to myself,” Vonnegut writes in the preface to Breakfast of Champions. As for those drawings, he himself explains: “I am programmed at fifty to perform childishly…” Be warned though — this book is anything but childish.

The novel is narrated by Vonnegut himself and the main characters (“two…fairly old white men”) are Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer, and Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac dealer. Hoover lives in Midland City and Trout is headed there to participate in an arts festival he’s been invited to attend. The two of them will meet and one of Trout’s stories that Hoover reads will forever change the latter’s understanding of life on earth.

That is the simplest explanation of the convoluted yarn that Vonnegut has spun in Breakfast of Champions. It’s a book that loves to poke savage fun at the jingoistic fervour that swept through the United States at the height of the Vietnam War (the novel was published in 1973) and takes everything from the country’s national anthem to its racial prejudices and its prison system to task.

At times, the digressions and segues into sub-sub-plots and side character biographies can get a bit overwhelming to the point where you wonder where Vonnegut is headed with this story. Do we need to know that Trout never found conventional routes to publishing and read yet another description of a pornographic magazine that publishes his work? Maybe not — but as the details build up and Vonnegut leads us through the tawdry underside of the American dream like a mad jester, you realise the method in the seeming madness. The curtain is pulled aside to show the ‘new world’ at its barest, its most naked greed and rapacious desires exposed. It’s not a pretty sight.

Vonnegut-as-the-narrator makes this observation at one point: “…They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.” Fed up with this insatiable desire for violence, Vonnegut goes on to say he “resolved to shun storytelling” and would write about life, which means giving all facts equal weight and thus bringing “chaos to order”. Hence, the sprawl and sensory overload of Breakfast of Champions.

Towards the end of the book, you get what Vonnegut-as-author is trying to do and failing to achieve as a writer. A failing he conveys in the very last line, which holds the key to understanding the whole text.

For a book that was published in the 70s and is replete with authorial asides and mentions of contemporaneous events, Breakfast of Champions rarely feels dated. Our dying planet, gun violence, and racism are issues that cast long shadows on the story. Even fifty years after the book came out, these themes continue to resonate.

The author is a writer and communications professional. When she’s not reading, writing or watching cat videos, she can be found on Instagram @saudha_k where she posts about reading, writing, and cats.

That One Book is a fortnightly column that does exactly what it says — it takes up one great classic and tells you why it is (still) great.