It’s a martini, incidentally. Not to disparage the fine products made by General Mills, of course!
Occasionally I’ll wonder if it isn’t terribly dorky and unhip to love Vonnegut. I’ll wonder if I should have outgrown him by now, moved on to someone with more traditional critical appeal … Saul Bellow, maybe? Pynchon? I could tell people I’m really into Jorge Luis Borges and it wouldn’t be totally untrue, but no, I’m a Vonnegut guy through and through.
Here’s a man who turned his experience as a WWII prisoner during the firebombing of Dresden into one of the greatest anti-war books of all time, Slaughterhouse-Five. “Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt.” But, I digress — I actually meant to tell you about a different book.
The plot of Breakfast of Champions is absurd and more than a little tenuous, but that’s what happens when Dwayne Hoover, midwestern Pontiac dealer, comes to believe that everyone around him is a robot and he’s the only thing in the universe with free will. He arrives at this belief due to two things.
- He’s not-so-slowly going mad.
- He interprets the works of a pulpy science fiction author as the true word of his Creator.
I hate to give it away, but things aren’t going to work out for Dwayne.
Vonnegut is never afraid to break down the barrier between writer and reader and I’m certain that’s part of his appeal for me. Breakfast of Champions is, to me, a vehicle for Vonnegut to talk to his readers and there’s a lot he’d like to talk about. Art, copyright, capitalism, pollution and more appear with his trademark dark humor and unique combination of cynicism and optimism. Author inserts and Vonnegut’s own drawings show up to help us get through the mayhem and madness as do characters from several other novels, although previous Vonnegutian reading is by no means needed.
So grab a copy a hang on; it’s going to be a wild ride!
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Tags: Aaron S.'s Picks, Cult Fiction, Dark Humor
