Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

Have you ever read a book and enjoyed it, but once you were finished you wondered what it was really about? You wondered if the book had a deep meaning that you had to sit and think about or if the book was just for entertainment purposes only and had no meaning whatsoever. For me, Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. was this type of book.

Breakfast of Champions is a story about two men who are going to eventually meet each other at a festival for the arts. The story tells about their journey in detail and explains how each man perceives and reacts to society.

Dwayne Hoover, a Pontiac salesman, is on the brink of insanity. Dwayne is a very “well-to-do” man and owns many businesses in Midland City where he resides. In the blink of an eye Dwayne’s life changes forever. One day Dwayne’s wife drinks Drano and is killed. After this incident Dwayne’s body starts producing “bad chemicals” which causes him to become insane.

The other main character of this book is a man by the name of Kilgore Trout. Kilgore is an interesting character. “Trout,” as he is referred to in the book, is a lonely person who thinks everyone in the world is against him. Trout lives by himself and sells screening and siding for houses. Trout’s best and only friend is his bird named Billy. Trout is a struggling writer whose work is mainly published in pornography magazines.

After that brief introduction of the story and characters I will now begin to explain my thoughts and ideas behind this book. When I first began to read this book I was hooked. It was very humorous and the book seemed like it would be a fun read. So I read on. With almost fifty pages left in the book I thought to myself “where is this book going?” I was thinking either that I have the worst case of A.D.D. ever or that this book has absolutely no meaning at all. I finished the book and was astounded. I just read 300 pages and had no clue whatsoever what the point of the book was. I quickly came to the realization that sometimes things in life aren’t supposed to have meaning. Why does everything in life have to have order and meaning? Vonnegut illustrates this point in his story by his reference to human beings as “machines.” Vonnegut explains that each person is a “machine” and has to have purpose and explanation to everything in life. I was a perfect example of this theory. I expected the book to have a meaning and for it to follow the construction of a normal story. When the story did not follow a normal storyline I became really confused. Confusion might have been one of Vonnegut’s main purposes in writing