Vonnegut In Retrospect: Breakfast Of Champions

Breakfast Of Champions (1973)


If I recall correctly from Vonnegut biography And So It Goes, Vonnegut struggled mightily with this follow up to his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five, going through endless versions and rewrites. Vonnegut acknowledges as much when he introduces a dog at the end of the book and mentions that it had a major role in an earlier version. This struggle comes through in the reading, and not in a good way. Much like God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, this book has flashes of brilliance but fails to come together in the whole.


Free will is a theme, with Vonnegut equating humans to machines throughout the book, suggesting we have no choice how we behave and react but are at the mercy of our chemicals. The two protagonists are Dwayne Hoover who has "bad chemicals" and sci-fi author Kilgore Trout who is travelling to Hoover's hometown for an arts festival. We are told early on that once he arrives, Hoover will read one of Trout's stories and it will cause him to go on a violent rampage. The fateful meeting finally arrives after a too-long lead up. Vonnegut inserts himself as a character watching the climax unfold and even interacts with Trout, telling him he is "setting him free," along with all the other characters Vonnegut has used up to this point in his career, meaning he won't be using them in any more stories. (Vonnegut didn't stay true to that promise.) The weird climax is worth the uneven trip to get there, but this is not Vonnegut at his best. You still get lots of Vonnegut doodles and inspired moments like this:

There is no order in the world around us, we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

7.2/10