Breakfast of Champions

Vonnegut here is like a shaman who throws a bunch of knuckle bones in the air, sees how they land, and tells the client what they mean. The novel is a crazy ramble through whatever Vonnegut had tucked away in the absurdist corner of his mind. It's dark and dangerous, reaching past satire to the edges of savagery.

SciFi author Kilgore Trout appears again alongside other Vonnegut regulars. He's been invited to an arts festival where one of his books about a lone human on a planet of robots sparks a psychotic episode in a paticipant. The narrator has made many references to 'bad chemicals' effecting human behaviour, but the assumption has been drug references. As the story progresses we see that he means the chemicals our brain makes for itself. Humanity is little more than a bunch of robots being controlled by our own chemistry.

To add to his theme, the narrator becomes a character in the book towards the end, demonstrating how he can make any character in the story do whatever he wants them to do. It's a weird flex that adds to the feeling of insanity that threads its way through the whole story.

I read this in the 7th grade. I don't think my parents had any idea what it was.

A curious book. Vonnegut can be an acquired taste with his acerbic, satirical wit and quirky use of science fiction. This famously unfilmable book (which Bruce Willis once made a (bad) film of), is paper thin when it comes to plot. It is essentially the story of two characters (Dwayne Hoover, a used car salesman with mental difficulties, and Kilgore Trout, a failed Science Fiction author) meeting at an Arts Festival and how they got to that meeting and what happened next. But Vonnegut uses their respective journeys as a chance to pontificate about life, the universe and, well, everything.

Published in the early seventies, with it's bitesize paragraphs and hand drawn illustrations by Vonnegut himself this novel is very “meta”, especially when the author himself turn up in the final chapters to meet his alter ego Kilgore. I'm sure it's all very hilarious to a certain mindset, and Vonnegut is a great writer (both Slaughterhouse 5 and Cat's Cradle are brilliant), but this didn't do it for me. I was neither engaged by the characters or entertained by the humour.

So, for me, it's not the masterpiece it's held up to be. Proceed with caution.