Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday! by Kurt Vonnegut
“And so on.”
In his 1973 classic, Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday!, Kurt Vonnegut tackles…oh, just about everything.
The storyline involves a surreal (we’re talking Vonnegut, so the word perhaps becomes redundant) collision between Kilgore Trout, an obscure science fiction writer who does not know much about science yet concocts head-spinning variants of reality, and Dwayne Hoover, a boorish entrepreneur who enjoys a local celebrity status in his hometown of Midland City, Ohio. One day, an eccentric millionaire discovers Trout’s stories, hidden in the backs of hardcore porno magazines (Stephen King got his real-world start this way), and invites Trout as a featured speaker to a festival in the town’s new arts building, where Trout’s momentous meeting with Hoover occurs.
The title of the book, as Vonnegut explains, mimics the tagline of Wheaties breakfast cereal, but actually has to do with the fact that a Midland City waitress says “Breakfast of Champions” whenever she serves a guest a martini. “Blue Monday” refers to the blues that accompanies women on Mondays, when laundry day supposedly took place, until new mechanical washing machines obviated time constraints. Vonnegut intersperses the text with his own simple pen illustrations, which depict everything from dinosaurs to assholes.
To thicken the plot, Hoover experiences a slow schizophrenic break from reality, which climaxes at his meeting with Trout. Vonnegut intimates a similar strain of mental difference in his own family, and at the very least, he shows how fiction writing involves troubling boundaries between imagination with the external world. Vonnegut teleports himself into the novel towards the end, in first person, appearing as a stranger in a bar with mirrored sunglasses. The conceit allows Trout to meet his creator, which also allows Vonnegut to problematize his responsibilities to his characters.
The possible pathology of writer-as-worldmaker, if not god, reminds me of a line from Joan Didion’s essay, “On Keeping a Notebook,” where Didion reflects on documenting facts that differ from others’ recollections. She writes, “…not only have I always had trouble distinguishing between what happened and what merely might have happened, but I remain unconvinced that the distinction, for my purposes, matters.” Vonnegut notes that people strike him as robots anyway, and the novel veers towards solipsism.
Vonnegut levels a steady stream of satire for comedic effect. He defines common terms as through for the benefit of visiting space aliens who are new to all this earth stuff. For example, he informs the reader that Kilgore Trout’s school, Thomas Jefferson High School, takes its name from “a slave owner who was also one of the greatest theoreticians on the subject of human liberty.” He also reports male characters’ penis length and girth measurements at random intervals throughout. Vonnegut possesses a stand-up performer’s penchant for presenting the absurdity of the world. Embellishment isn’t necessary. The oddity of things as they are is enough.
Beyond satire, however, the book proves an incisive cultural studies critique. For example, in describing Midland City, Vonnegut notes, “Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.” Well, heck! That one sentence sums up the thrust of my five-years of doctoral work, with social critics Richard Schechner, Erving Goffman, and Judith Butler rolled into one.
Vonnegut holds no cows sacred when he addresses society’s ills. Ready yourself for a steady stream of the “N—” word, for example, as he lobs offhand observations about American racism in crass language. While authors of color making free use the term as a strategy of reappropriation of an historically murderous slur (that’s the consensus interpretation, though I wonder at times what other factors might be operating) might feel more familiar, a white author doing so, albeit one who is crystal clear in his use of hate speech as an ironic condemnation of those who hold such beliefs, raises the stakes. Ditto for commentary on gender bias, social class conflict, environmental degradation, etc., etc.
In its time, Breakfast of Champions enjoyed wild success not only with critics but general readerships, which in an emerging cellphone addicted world that does turn people into robots (and increasingly, robots into people), seems remarkable.
The book resembles an adolescent chapter book, with some sections as short as a single paragraph, but don’t let the spare typesetting fool you. I read fifty pages a day as per my adopted reading practice, but less than five pages a day would probably have been optimal. Vonnegut’s “simple” writing style belies dense ideation, as well as multiple levels of humor, and you kind of need to sit with each episode of the story.
Breakfast of Champions strikes a success in making the world’s windmill’s blades rotate the wrong way. You can picture comedian George Carlin reading it on a plane and chuckling through violent turbulence. The book’s self-aware metafiction takes the work to another level, in a way that, for instance, Helen Oyeyemi Mr. Fox, didn’t quite achieve.
I’d only read Slaughterhouse-Five of Vonnegut’s work, and Breakfast of Champions has a similar mind-expanding quality. I ran into a friend on my way back from the library with the book in hand, and he told me that he puts off reading more Vonnegut because once he has read them all, there aren’t any more, which is perfect and moreover seems like a Vonnegut thing to say.
Vonnegut uses the phrase “And so on” as a leitmotif (and de rigueur, explains why he does so mid-narrative). Read this book and feel free to shake your head at the inanity of humans. Maybe we are just robots but if we can laugh at ourselves, that’s probably okay.
And so on.