Breakfast of Champions
| Original Title: | Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday |
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| Written by: | Kurt Vonnegut |
| Central Theme: | |
| Synopsis: | |
| Genre(s): | Satire |
| First published: | 1973 |
Breakfast of Champions, or, Goodbye, Blue Monday! is Kurt Vonnegut's seventh novel, and one of his stranger dips into metafiction. First published in 1973.
Dwayne Hoover is the fabulously well-to-do owner of a Pontiac dealership. He's made his money in real estate. He's handsome and has oodles of charm. He's also been going slowly insane since his wife committed suicide.
Kilgore Trout is the reclusive author of various obscure science fiction stories for different, largely pornographic publishers. He has just received an invitation to speak at an arts festival down the road from Dwayne Hoover's Pontiac dealership, and he wants to appear as the ultimate representative of failure.
Kilgore Trout's fiction will inspire Dwayne Hoover to completely snap and go on a rampage.
Tropes used in Breakfast of Champions include:
- Author Avatar
- Author Tract: The book begins by describing the country in which the characters live (the United States) and all the ways in which it is fucked up.
- Bullet Time: Near the end of the book, Vonnegut is startled by a dog that leaps at him, and he describes, in detail, his chemical processes as adrenaline is pumped into his bloodstream and the dog drifts lazily closer like a blimp with teeth, and how his testicles retract into his body in such a manner that the doctors tell him " only surgery can bring them down again".
- Canon Welding: Eliot Rosewater, Francine Pefko, and Kilgore Trout return after previous appearances in Vonnegut's work. Vonnegut says in the introduction that the book was written to retire all of his older characters.
- Captain Obvious: Vonnegut as narrator constantly makes incredibly obvious statements in order to make a statement that all details are important.
- Contemptible Cover: Kilgore Trout's stories are usually published with pornographic illustrations, leading to the name and author credit of one of his books being covered by a promise of "wide open beavers."
- Either or Title: "Breakfast of Champions" or "Goodbye, Blue Monday!"
- Food Porn: One of Trout's stories is about a planet where food was scarce, so the inhabitants' pornography is people eating food slowly and happily.
- Foregone Conclusion: Vonnegut states right at the beginning that Dwayne Hoover will snap and seriously injure several people.
- Fourth Wall Shut-in Story: The character Kilgore Trout is supposed to be a stand-in for Vonnegut, and toward the end of the story, Trout has conversations with Vonnegut (who is the third-person omniscient narrator). The content of these conversations is Trout (fictional) demanding changes to his world from Vonnegut (real), but the underlying subtext is of Vonnegut (real), in futility, demanding impossible changes to his own life.
- Freak-Out: Finally happens to Dwayne Hoover after reading the story by Kilgore Trout, which tells him that all other people are just mindless machines created as part of an experiment by God to see how he will react to them.
- Gag Penis: Vonnegut claims that his penis is three inches long and five inches in diameter.
- One character has a penis 800 miles long and 210 miles in diameter, but practically all of it is in the fourth dimension.
- Gayngst: Dwayne's son, Bunny, suffers quite a bit, becoming an introvert with no friends or lovers.
- Go Mad from the Revelation - Although the Freak-Out (see above) is triggered by the story he reads, the insanity is caused by late stage syphilis.
- Immune to Fate: Meta-example: after reading Trout's story, Hoover believes this applies to him. It doesn't.
- Lemony Narrator: Vonnegut himself.
- Meta Fiction: Vonnegut himself appears as a character, amongst other things. There are also Kilgore Trout's many stories, many of which play rôles in the plot, one of them pivotal.
- Narrative Filigree
- No Fourth Wall: Like in Slaughterhouse-Five, the narrator is Kurt Vonnegut. In fact, he shows up in the story toward the end.
- Our Lawyers Advised This Trope: Vonnegut slips in two legal advisories that the title of the book is not meant to reflect upon General Mills' "fine products."
- Prison Rape: Jailbird Wayne Hoobler has been in one institution or another for so long that this is the only kind of sex that he knows about.
- Rage Against the Author: Kurt Vonnegut hands Kilgore Trout an apple and disappears. Trout, realizing that Vonnegut is his creator is left on the sidewalk begging him to come back and make him young. Since Trout is Vonnegut's Author Avatar, Vonnegut himself is wishing for his lost youth.
- Sanity Slippage: Hoover is slowly going crazy, but he hides it well enough that nobody suspects he needs professional help...until it's too late.
- Show Within a Show: Kilgore Trout's novels and short stories, which receive more focus than in previous books.
- Shrouded in Myth: While traveling through New York City, Trout gets mugged along with another man. He can't identify the assailants to police afterwards, saying that an intelligent gas from Pluto might have attacked him for all he knows. The headline the next day in the New York Post is "PLUTO BANDITS KIDNAP PAIR". The story spreads and becomes more and more embellished, and it isn't long before everybody in the city is scared to death of a fearsome pack of thugs known as the "Pluto Gang". Even international news is warning people who might travel to NYC that they need to be careful and watch out for the Pluto Gang when they get there.
- And a group of punks then start up a Pluto Gang...
- Tradesnark™: At the beginning of the book.
- Toilet Humor: The illustrations range from cows to assholes to beavers to "wide open beavers." Additionally, almost all of the male characters' penises are given measurements.
- True Art Is Incomprehensible: Rabo Karabekian, who goes on to star in Bluebeard, revels in making money through modern art. Once Rabo explains his artwork, Vonnegut says it is fantastic, whereas before he wasn't very impressed with it.