Breakfast of Champions

"I am going to make a wild guess now: I think that the end of the Civil War in my country frustrated the white people in the North, who won it, in a way which has never been acknowledged before. Their descendants inherited that frustration, I think, without ever knowing what it was. The victors in that war were cheated out of the most desirable spoils of that war, which were human slaves."

Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions is a postmodern metafictional narrative in which Vonnegut becomes a character, breaking the fourth wall. Again, intertextuality within the world he constructs in his novels continues here, as Midland City, Ohio is also the setting of Deadeye Dick and characters from other novels appear in this book, such as Kilgore Trout, the science fiction writer. Besides connections with his other novels, all of the characters in Breakfast of Champions are connected in interesting ways by name, family history, past sins (which cast long shadows), race, and the horrific society surrounding the robots. In addition to satirizing just about everything and writing in a characteristically succinct, humorous, and brief style with excessive symbols and non sequiturs. Like in his many other novels, his anti-war stance, disdain for racism and the class system, and interest in science fiction motivate much of the work. His own mother's suicide, his childhood with a black domestic who raised him, as well as his experiences in WWII shape this novel in many ways. 

Although not science fiction, by using the fictional science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut is able to explore other worlds, human existence, and the senselessness of the world through those lens. He alludes to Trout's numerous writings, writes against conventional notions of the novel, breathes life into everyday objects and people, and manages to somehow capture the absurd state of race relations in the novel as it relates to technology, history, gender, and class relations. Vonnegut satirizes war, capitalism, greed, corporate responsibility, white supremacy, sexism, the notion of free will, religion, slavery, and even colonialism. Indeed, one can see where his interest in Haiti could arise from his anti-racist, anti-colonial sentiments as expressed in this work.

Below are some of my favorite quotations from the text. Enjoy!

"The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them."

'Kilgore Trout became a pioneer in the field of mental health. He advanced his theories disguised as science-fiction. He died in 1981, almost twenty years after he made Dwayne Hoover so sick."

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane."

"Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind."

"Ideas on Earth were badges of friendship or enmity. Their content did not matter. Friends agreed with friends, in order to express enmity."

"His high school was named after a slave owner who was also one of the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty."

"The black people would not put up with this. They went on talking English every which way. They refused to read books they couldn't understand--on the grounds they couldn't understand them. They would ask such impudent questions as, "Whuffo I want to read no "Tale of Two Cities? Whuffo?"

"It didn't matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn't mattered much for years. It didn't matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery--or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play--as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway."

"He was a graduate of West Point, a military academy which turned young men into homicidal maniacs for use in war."

"The reindeer problem was essentially this: Nobody white had much use for black people anymore--except for the gangsters who sold the black people used cars and dope and furniture. Still, the reindeer went on reproducing. There were these useless, big black animals everywhere, and a lot of them had very bad dispositions. They were given small amounts of money every month, so they wouldn't have to steal. There was talk of giving them very cheap dope, too--to keep them listless and cheerful, and uninterested in reproduction."

"The nickname for Bunny's neighborhood was Skid Row. Every American town of any size had a neighborhood with the same nickname: Skid Row. It was a place where people who didn't have any friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were supposed to go."

"I put the most decorated veteran in Midland City on the other end. He had a penis eight hundred miles long and two hundred and ten miles in diameter, but practically all of it was in the fourth dimension. He got his medals in the war in Viet Nam. He had also fought yellow robots who ran on rice."

"Like everybody else in the cocktail lounge, he was softening his brain with alcohol. This was a substance produced by a tiny creature called yeast. Yeast organisms ate sugar and excreted alcohol. They killed themselves by destroying their own environment with yeast shit."

"It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."

"And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: 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."

"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. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badley, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe."

"Barrytron would be absolutely sick when it learned what a polluter it had become. Throughout its history, it had attempted to be a perfect model of corporate good citizenship, no matter what it cost."

"Dwayne Hoover's stepmother wasn't the only white woman who was a terrible sport about doing work like that. My own mother was that way, too, and so was my sister, may she rest in peace. They both flatly refused to do Nigger work.

The white men wouldn't do it either, of course. They called it women's work, and women called it Nigger work."

"It seems to me that really truthful American novels would have the heroes and heroines alike looking for mothers instead. This needn't be embarrassing. It's simply true. A mother is much more useful. I wouldn't feel particularly good if I found another father. Neither would Dwayne Hoover. Neither Would Kilgore Trout."

"Here was why there were so many foreign doctors on the hospital staff, incidentally: The country didn't produce nearly enough doctors for all the sick people it had, but it had an awful lot of money. So it bought doctors from other countries which didn't have much money."

"Both men, incidentally, were descendants of the Emperor Charlemagne. Anybody with any European blood in him was a descendant of the Emperor Charlemagne."