Critical Response Archive: Breakfast Of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s first novel after a lengthy slump following one of his more famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five, definitely comes off as somewhat scatterbrained, yet it is more cohesive than some other novels I have read, like Naked Lunch. Breakfast of Champions blends all of the elements of postmodernism together, combining the critique of highbrow literary criticism and tangential self-indulgence of Pale Fire’s narrative and narrator with the obscene absurdity of Naked Lunch, meanwhile adding social commentary, philosophical musings, and self-self-referencing to the postmodern mix. The result is a marriage of highbrow and lowbrow culture, a trademark of many of the postmodern novels that followed. And once again the depressing prose is spiced with satire, easing the pain of swallowing the determinist analysis on our doomed reality. Upon further research behind the writing of Breakfast of Champions, I found that Kilgore Trout and other characters in the novel also appear in Vonnegut’s other novels. I wish now to read some of Vonnegut’s other work in my own spare time so that I can see how Breakfast of Champions fits into his multiverse.

Vonnegut has also blurred the concept of reality within the story, though with references to himself and the real world, he seems to be questioning the reality of our own world, in which he and the reader exist, as well. Vonnegut doesn’t just critique the nature of a story and its construction, but also the construction of the reality in which we live. Reality in Breakfast of Champions is distorted twofold, since Vonnegut wrote the story as an author of his own creation. His “author” presents and makes observations of the world around him (which rather closely resembles our own) in ways that the intended audience had probably never thought of before, like viewing the European explorers as “sea pirates.” Every now and then there are points at which the “author,” Philboyd Stodge, admits to taking some elements of his own life and putting them into the novel, and it’s clear from the preface (and knowing of Vonnegut’s creative process in writing this novel) that parts of Vonnegut’s own life and self are a part of the novel, as well.

Breakfast of Champions, while befuddling and thought-provoking in its own right, is more accessible than the lofty prose of Pale Fire, the disconnectedness of Naked Lunch, and the experimentalism of Pricksongs and Descants. Though this is the only Vonnegut that I’ve read, I think I can gather that he was one of the first mass-postmodern writers, who—while he did include themes that were relevant to avid readers and writers—he also spoke to the “common” reader. He questions both the nature of literature and reality itself.