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Rating: Kurt Vonnegut was my lifeline, so much that, in the last twenty years, the echo of the narrative voice of the story of Slaughterhouse-Five has occasionally resonated in the recesses of my mind. Comfortably ironic, naively satirical. Perspective-altering, disorienting.
Reading Cat's Cradle I didn’t find it, but reading Breakfast of Champions or Goodbye Blue Monday I did. Camouflaged under a false master, I encountered it again, intent on narrating a new story.
The narrator of the novel is Philboyd Studge, the author's alter ego; the protagonists are Kilgore Trout, a marginalized writer, and Dwayne Hoover, a businessman who is losing his mind. The time frame of the story is a single day and the setting is mainly Midland City, an anonymous town in the middle of the United States.
The plot develops around the Arts Festival of Midland City, in the middle of the United States. In this city, at the beginning of the sixties, the narrator and the protagonists of the novel meet.
They are two white men, already advanced in age. Trout is a prolific and dazed author of science fiction novels. If at the beginning of the story he is a nobody believing his life is ending, by the end he will realize he was wrong. While he travels to Midland City, in that city Hoover starts going berserk against his employees.
After the journey is completed, the plot shows how Trout's vivid imagination, now that he has arrived in town, affects Hoover's already unstable mind. He has put down on paper a novel titled Now It Can Be Told, composed of a single long letter, in which the Creator sends a long letter to the only creature with free will on Earth to confide that all other creatures are nothing more than machines programmed to do this and that. Hoover, who mistakes Trout for a messenger, believes the message of this letter and acts accordingly.
Philboyd Studge, the narrator, is also present at this moment. He had told us he wanted to clear his brain through this novel:
"I am trying, I think, to clear my head of all the junk cluttering it: assholes, flags, underpants. Yes, this book even contains a drawing of a pair of underpants. And I want to get rid of the characters from other books of mine... I think I will try to empty my head until it's like it was when I was born on this wrecked planet fifty years ago."
Thus, while he narrated this story, he was able to ramble about all the merchandise and fetishes that our characters encountered physically and in their minds during their adventures. He does so by explaining everything and often drawing; this is because Vonnegut, his creator, was disturbed by the advent of television and wanted to make his writings more "visual". Indeed, he thought that through these drawings, readers (especially the forty million illiterate Americans), while looking at a representation of a pair of underpants, would have no problem recognizing them and thinking to themselves underpants, and maybe they wouldn't abandon the book to watch television.
The result of all this is fabulous and surreal; the effect is disorienting.
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By zaireeka
As in many of Vonnegut’s novels, the plot was absurd and irrelevant. You could tear all the pages out and put them back together at random without compromising your reading experience.
What I liked most about Breakfast of Champions was this: unlike most books, it didn’t assume that the reader knew everything about human beings, their habits, and the planet they inhabited.
