Breakfast of Champions :: Breakfast of Champions Essays

eat of ChampionsOur aw atomic number 18ness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.(p.221) IntroductionBreakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday is Kurt Vonneguts seventh fresh. He wrote it in 1972, as he himself says, for his fiftieth birthday. It is Vonneguts own parody of himself and his works. The various themes and mannerisms that have animated the primarily fictions are seen here in a grotesque, cartoon version of themselves, (Todd). It is a confrontation of tragedy of America brought forth by Vonneguts sensitivity to tragedy (Uphaus), where Vonnegut seems to fuss middle Americas nose in the sheer ugliness of life. (Merill) The storyBreakfast of Champions is a story of two l geniussome, skinny old men on a planet which was dying fast,(p.???). One of these two men is Dwayne Hoover, a fabulously well-to-do Pontiac Dealer, and the other is Kilgore Trout, an unknown and unsuccessful science fiction writer. These two c haracters are destined to meet in Midland City and Kilgore Trouts book Now It Can Be Told is destined to turn Dwayne Hoover into homicidal maniac. How the novel is writtenThe novel attacks many things slavery, racism, commercial greed, jingoism, ecology, capitalism, imperialism, overpopulation etc., all of these aimed precisely at modern Ameri set up society. Vonnegut brings a remarcable air of discovery to these themes, the pretense that no one has quite seen before the stark outlines of our hypocrisy, (Todd). Vonnegut is impolite in his writing about these matters. He was taught to this impoliteness when he was a kid (p.2) by Phoebe Hurty -- the person this novel is dedicated to.The whole book is written in quite familiar style which was used in Vonneguts previous novel Slaughterhouse Five. The style can be defined by one line from it If accident will (Vonnegut 1969, p.2). Breakfast of Champions also has the vague image of absolute chaos. Vonnegut denounced books that make people think that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, that it has lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end, (p.209). But chaos is not only a way in which Vonnegut writes, it is also what Vonnegut writes about. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had becomemore and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisionsmade by my countrymen. And because I had come suddenly to pity