Breakfast of Champions

Vonnegut narrates the entire novel as though explaining human civilization to a reader encountering it for the first time, drawing his own crude illustrations of a flag, a can of beefaroni, an asshole, treating ordinary American objects with the same anthropological flatness he'd use for an alien species' totems. The effect strips the ugliness, guns, pollution, casual racism, of its familiarity and makes it look, correctly, insane.

Two men converge on the fictional Midland City arts festival: Dwayne Hoover, a wealthy Pontiac dealer whose brain chemistry, Vonnegut's blunt, recurring explanation for cruelty throughout the book, is quietly deteriorating, and Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's hack science-fiction alter ego, invited as guest of honor almost as a cosmic joke. Dwayne reads one of Trout's unreadable, brilliant paperbacks, which argues that everyone on Earth except the reader is a robot without free will, and takes it with total, literal sincerity, a premise Vonnegut treats less as satire of a gullible reader than as a demonstration of how easily a persuasive story, believed too completely, becomes a weapon.

Trout himself has spent decades writing exactly this kind of destabilizing premise into cheap paperbacks nobody reads seriously, stocked in adult bookstores between the pornography, his ideas wasted on a readership that only wants the covers. Vonnegut's running joke, that Trout is a genius nobody will ever recognize as one, stops being funny the moment a single reader finally does take him seriously, and takes him seriously enough to maim people with the idea.

Vonnegut writes himself directly into the novel's final chapters, watching Dwayne's breakdown from a cocktail lounge stool, eventually revealing himself to his own creation Kilgore Trout as his literal creator. The confrontation plays less as postmodern trick than as genuine authorial guilt and repair, Vonnegut answering for the damage his own fiction, the free-will hoax Dwayne believed without question, has caused inside the story he's responsible for.

Vonnegut also uses the frame to explain, plainly, that he's turning fifty and trying to clear his head of the characters he's accumulated over a career, treating Breakfast of Champions less as a novel about Dwayne Hoover than as its author's own public housecleaning, conducted in front of the reader instead of privately. The drawings, the childlike explanations of ordinary objects, the interruptions, all read differently once it's clear Vonnegut isn't performing detachment from his material so much as trying to set it down.