Review: Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

A bit funny, a bit confusing, sometimes amusing, and mostly just weird. The story doesn’t make much sense and the characters are absurd, but this seems to be largely intentional in this absurdist novel. It makes for an uneven read, with a few wonderful highlights separated by lots of forgettable nonsense.

(Minor spoiler alert) The memorable parts for me were:

• The idea that many Americans try to live lives like those of characters in books and movies, who are driven not by the needs of life, morality, or logic, but by an author’s whims and desires. In a book, it can be convenient to get rid of a character by killing them; in life, not so much.

• Vonnegut, the author and narrator of the book, appears in his own story, sitting quietly in a bar at first, and eventually starting to interact with his characters, and even discussing free will with them. It’s very meta.

• Vonnegut’s observational writing style, full of little one-liners. I enjoyed hearing of alcohol defined as yeast excrement and guns as tools whose sole purpose is for making holes in human beings.

Other than these little bits and pieces, I’d honestly have trouble telling you what happened in the story, even just a week after reading it. So it’s an amusing and unique read, but somehow it didn’t really come together for me.

As always, I saved a few of my favorite quotes:

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.”

“Your parents were fighting machines and self-pitying machines. Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective moneymaking machine, and your father was programmed to bawl out your mother for being a defective housekeeping machine. They were programmed to bawl each other out for being defective loving machines. Then your father was programmed to stomp out of the house and slam the door. This automatically turned your mother into a weeping machine. And your father would go down to the tavern where he would get drunk with some other drinking machines. Then all the drinking machines would go to a whorehouse and rent fucking machines. And then your father would drag himself home to become an apologizing machine. And your mother would become a very slow forgiving machine.”

“And so on.”

Rating: 3 stars