Kurt Vonnegut's The Breakfast Of Champions

Words: 1404
Pages: 6
Open Document
The Breakfast of Champions
The Breakfast of Champions novel by Kurt Vonnegut was written almost at the same time as his 50th birthday. He records in the beginning chapter that the piece is a gift for his birthday. He states further that he is planning to explain all the junks in his head in the book. Having this in mind, therefore, it fascinating to say that this book of junk comes out to be one of his most developed and organized novels. The story archives the death of a used Pontiac car salesman, Dwayne Hoover, on the face of the mildly immaterial pulp science literature writer, Kilgore Trout. Hoover has reached a conclusion that he is the only human being on the planet, and the rest of other people are just but a robot that was designed …show more content…
In Breakfast of Champions, he does not only do this but also presents an ending in a nonchalant style, which is reflected right in the beginning of the book. With the climax already spoiled, Vonnegut then goes back to the episodes taking us to the final scene where Trout and Hoover finally meet. This plot line is both very flat and linear as well. The revisiting the scenes in an organized manner without an emphasis on one scene gives the story uneventful and a very flat overtone. This lack of a steady flow of events without any significance supplies the readers with an element of meaninglessness lives in daily episodes. The only important part is where the novel has an opportunity of spiking a little bit at the ending, where Vonnegut has skillfully revealed in the first chapter of the Novel. In Vonnegut's case, he leaves the audience to look for meaning in a meaningless situation. Moreover, this linear and flat plot line with no episode being of any importance more than another creates a monotonous and repetitious flavor that appears to focus on the real life in that it seems to repeat itself, and does not have a powerful ending. Robert W. Uphaus, in his novel The Forum on Fiction, captures a direct quote from Vonnegut his own article known as Expected Meaning in Vonnegut’s Dead-End Fiction, where Vonnegut asserts that it always strikes him as a comical and gruesome in the culture that has an expectation that a man should always work out his problems (Uphaus 164). Uphaus continues to investigate in the piece the pertinent question of what are people for where he records that people have freedom of doing their own thing and that they can have at least the delusion of growth creatively and at times practically but their things are
Show More

Related Documents: Kurt Vonnegut's The Breakfast Of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut Research Paper

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was born in November, in Indianapolis, Indiana, a city he would later utilize as a symbol of American Values. Kurt Vonnegut Sr. saw great success in his architectural business, and his wife Edith, was the daughter of a wealthy Indianapolis brewer. Kurt Jr. was the youngest of their three children, along with middle child Alice and eldest, Bernard. The fortunes of the family drastically changed during the course of the Depression, when Kurt Sr. lost his architectural business and…

Words 707 - Pages 3

Violence In Vonnegut's Character Analysis

The powerless have a limited perception of the world around them due to their blissful ignorance of the control that the powerful hold over them. By being blissfully ignorant, characters in Vonnegut’s novels refuse to acknowledge the violence that ensues around them, and therefore unwittingly allow said violence to occur. In Slaughterhouse-Five, a hospitalized character named Rumfoord does not acknowledge the severity of the violence that occurred in World War II because he was not directly affected…

Words 1343 - Pages 6