Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut may be my favorite new book. The way he describes and fully explores each character was a technique that I haven’t seen before. He explored their past and future in a way that didn’t truly move the storyline, but it did make the story the amazing book that it was.
The beginning started off rather slowly, and I almost stopped reading it. He over-explained things that I already knew such as America, but his use of drawings was interesting, especially the crude way that they were done. However, I continued reading the book, and soon, I began to thoroughly enjoy it. Despite enjoying it, I could not read it for long periods of time. Personally, I found that because each line of the book was so packed with information, I could not enjoy it in large amounts.
Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, the main characters of the book, were not the most interesting characters in the book. I found the other characters to be much more thrilling. However, at times, I found the story tedious whenever it got into a lull. At these points, I would have been much more interested if Vonnegut had compensated with things such as the description. Some parts were incredibly interesting while others simply had to be read through.
However, whenever Kurt Vonnegut began putting himself in the story and revealing personal aspects of his life and it related to the characters, I became enthralled. The only critique I have of this is that I almost didn’t make it to this point because of how slow the book started out. He didn’t have anything that caught my attention until almost a quarter through the book with the mentioning of how Dwayne’s wife died by eating Draino.
He also built suspense well with Dwayne’s “sickness,” and I loved how the chemicals sometimes kicked in, but all of the information that was revealed about how he would break down lessened the impact of the actual event. I thought it was interesting how Kilgore Trout caused this to happen with his own work, but I also felt like this scene didn’t reach its full potential.
My favorite part of the book was the dog, Kazak. Here, Kurt Vonnegut is on his way to meet Kilgore Trout, but he has forgot the character that he made because he edited it out. However, as he describes it:
“I should have known that a character as ferocious as Kazak was not easily cut out of a novel.”
The dog, his very own character, ends up attacking him.
I thought that it was especially interesting how even though the entire book was about Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover meeting and how Trout’s story would cause Dwayne Hoover to have his meltdown, Hoover simply bit Trout’s finger off. They did not turn out to be epic friends at all; this wasn’t a book about two people who became friends or even enemies. It was a story of life and all of the people we meet along the way, their pasts and futures, and how everyone is affected by everyone else. To put it as the painter did, we are all simply bands of light.
“It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us.”
