Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion. The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count.

Product Description
Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.

Listen: This story revolves mainly around two characters. There's Kilgore Trout who is an aging and bitter sci-fi writer that nobody has ever heard of (except for one person). His stories have only appeared in very adult magazines. So naturally, he has "doodley-squat" to show for it. The other person that this story is about is a car dealer by the name of Dwayne Hoover, a man that everyone in town considers a "fabulously well-to-do" person. Dwayne is losing his mind and is ever so gracefully slipping into the cozy and wonderful world of insanity. What pushes him over the edge will take place when the two meet and Hoover takes one of Trout's literary works as reality. The results are unforgettable and hilariously disturbing in this dark and offbeat tale of the flawed human beings who are destroying Mother Earth.

This amazingly written book is completely ADDICTING. I easily finished it within a week. Once you start you do not want to stop reading until you have finished. Very rarely does a book have the power to make me laugh aloud so frequently and carelessly. People must've thought I was on something when they saw me laugh so uncontrollably while reading this in public. Vonnegut's commentary as the overall storyteller provides us with such an enriching voice that really is the star of the story. He has also created some of the most memorable and certifiably insane characters ever to be witnessed by the world of fiction. Vonnegut cleverly attacks everything that is wrong in society and he does it in such a funny and witty way. His illustrations also add a lot to the story as well.

Reading a book like "Breakfast of Champions" reminds me why I want to be a writer. It also reminds me why we read in the first place. It is definitely a classic that stands on its own and will never EVER be duplicated. If you're looking for a "fabulously well-to-do" satirist that will never conform to the norm, Kurt Vonnegut is your man. If you have not read this book yet, I highly encourage you to check it out a.s.a.p.! It may not be your ordinary novel, but that's more the reason to read it, now isn't it? A definite new favorite that I will read again and again. -Michael Crane


Weird and wonderful: pure Vonnegut   March 28, 2002
 39 out of 44 found this review helpful

Kurt Vonnegut's novel "Breakfast of Champions" follows the odyssey of oddball science fiction writer Kilgore Trout from his melancholy childhood in Bermuda, to the sleazy underside of New York City, and eventually to a fateful encounter with car dealer Wayne Hoover, a man "on the brink of going insane." Within this framework Vonnegut weaves an amazing satiric tapestry that looks at racism, mental illness, environmental crises, the nature and function of art, and many other issues. The book is filled with Vonnegut's own quirky illustrations.

"Breakfast" is harsh, even cruel, but also tender and compassionate; it's laugh-out-loud funny, yet haunting and tragic. It's also a reality-warping metaphysical triumph; Vonnegut breaks down the barriers between reality and fiction, and invites the reader into the very process of the novel's creation. He creates a more intimate bond between author, reader, and fictional character than any other writer I can think of.

Vonnegut presents some of American literature's most memorable characters in "Breakfast." But my favorite is undoubtedly Trout. Throughout the book we also get glimpses of Trout's own voluminous body of work, and meet some of his bizarre sci-fi characters. The book as a whole is also enriched by Vonnegut's unique style; he writes as if for an extraterrestrial audience to whom humanity is utterly alien.

"Breakfast" is a profane, naughty, yet profoundly spiritual book. Filled with strange and vivid details, it's an oddly comforting modern-day testament for our fractured world. Thanks, Kurt.


A healthy dose of reality   September 28, 1999
 19 out of 29 found this review helpful

Many critics who have written their reviews below appear to believe that this book is either a brilliant summary of our society or a great big pile of trash.

I believe that it is somwhere in between.

Like Mark Twain, who warned his readers at the beginning of Huckelberry Finn to not analyze his literary work, nor try to find a point, Vonnegut seems to enjoy writing simply what he observes in every day life. Vonnegut never intends to have philosophical opinions and certainly doesn't wish to have his works read by Oprah's Book Club. Breakfast of Champions can offend almost any reader due to its racism, sexism, pornographic content, and political commentaries. This is the greatest aspect of the novel because Vonnegut tells his readers one thing that is very simple and blunt: he doesn't care what you think. This is a very refreshing quality for an author to possess because in today's world it is rare to stumble upon a written work that is not politically correct. Through reading this novel, I have come to respect Kurt Vonnegut for his honesty and his fearlessness in telling what he believes to be true. I only wish that there were more authors with Vonnegut's courage and talent.


Trix are for kids   November 9, 1998
 18 out of 26 found this review helpful

Reading the average review of Breakfast of Champions, one gets the impression that this book must be at once uproariously funny, incisive in its social critism, and deeply philosophical. In truth, none of the above are even remotely applicable.

Like Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut has often been likened to, Vonnegut's humor is largely based on tongue-in-cheek irreverence of the "Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" variety. The idea is to write a social critique from the perspective of a naive or unbiased outsider who is supposedly able to see things more clearly than everybody else. The outsider goes around pretending 'unwittingly' to expose absurdities, prejudices, and hypocrisy underlying various social conventions.

The outsider in Breakfast of Champions is a narrator who writes about Earthlings as if he were an intergalactic traveller. The irreverent statements he makes are supposed to shock hypocrites, while those who are in-the-know titter away at the spectacle. Concerning power politics, for instance, Vonnegut writes: "[America] disciplined other countries by threatening to shoot big rockets at them or to drop things on them from airplanes." About racism he declares: "A Nigger was a human being who was black."

Are you tittering?

The 'philosophical' content of Breakfast of Champions, like the social commentary, is shallow and presented with a singular lack of eloquence; unlike the social commentary, it is incoherent rather than simplistic. The narrator is mainly concerned with the principle of determinism and how it relates to mental health, and the main characters in the novel serve as personifications of different aspects of this dilemma. Dwayne Hoover, a car dealer from the midwest, goes crazy after reading a novel by Kilgore Trout, a pessimistic science fiction writer. The novel is in the form of a letter from the Creator to the only person on the planet with free will. Hoover, already losing his marbles at the time of reading the story, takes it literally, and ends up injuring some of the other characters whom, in his orgy of solipsism, he has dismissed as "machines".

The 'clever' reader is supposed to notice that the relationship between the Creator and the man with free will in Trout's novel is, on one level, an allegory of the relationship between a writer and the characters he creates. This is alluded to with increasing frequency until Vonnegut himself jumps into the novel to wreak havoc with the allegorical 'levels'. After being 'enlightened' via a speech by one of his characters about "awareness", Vonnegut tells the rest of the story about the Trout/Hoover encounter which personifies the author's personal triumph over madness.

Vonnegut's intent seems to have been to show that though "awareness" is not a sufficient premise for free will, it nevertheless distances us from the spectre of determinism by implying that we are more than simply biological machinery. The concept is not tremendously profound, and that is probably why Vonnegut goes to such lengths to obfuscate the issue with ambiguous and/or conflicting statements throughout the novel. Of course he might be just writing carelessly.

I have heard it proposed that the apparent incoherence of the novel is intentional in order to forestall any global interpretation of the book. People who support this view gleefully maintain that the point IS that there is NO point. This type of person will generally follow these remarks with something about how literature is written to evoke, not to explain; how the person searching for a 'purpose' in literature shows a fundamental lack of comprehension of what literature is.... And so on.

Breakfast of Champions is tasteless "trash" (I am quoting Vonnegut's own appraisal of the book on p.6 - for once his bluntness is entirely apt), fortified with heaps of smug pretentiousness. If you can stomach this sort of junk, have it your way; for a real literary meal, look elsewhere.


Vonnegut is Creator of my Universe   January 6, 2000
 15 out of 16 found this review helpful

Is it possible to say anything new about a book that has been in print for ~30 years, that has been read by millions, and which is widely studied in schools and universities?

No... but I do want to say that I loved every word (and illustration). You can pick up this old novel and get a very fresh outlook both on the human condition and on how novels ought to be written.

Vonnegut writes like he is explaining life on Earth to alien children. It is a tool that produces incredibly poignant satire, which he uses effectively to give commentary on conditions of life that the vast majority of us accept without even noticing. The language used is very simple but wonderfully lyrical, less-than-average readers will fly right through it.

Although clearly sadenned by his life, and by his observations of the planet, Vonnegut wrote a masterpiece that remains hopeful in its despair.

Kurt Vonnegut is a genius, and will no doubt be recognized as one of the 20th Century's greatest.