What's For Breakfast?

After Slaughterhouse-Five was a critical and commercial hit, Kurt Vonnegut struggled with his next novel. An interviewer for The New York Times reported in 1971 that Vonnegut had begun and abandoned a draft of a novel called Breakfast of Champions in which everyone but the narrator was a robot. With the primness of the Times, the interviewer reported that Vonnegut said, “It was going fine. It was a piece of —, that’s all.”

Breakfast of Champions came out in 1973, and it’s not what the interviewer stated, though there’s a man in it who comes to think that everyone on earth is a robot. It received mixed reviews, even if nobody precisely described it as a piece of whatever could not be printed in the Times. It sold well, and is still one of Vonnegut’s better-known works, but Vonnegut himself never warmed to it.

It must be difficult to follow up a book immediately hailed as a masterpiece, but Breakfast has to be considered a fair attempt. It fuses the themes of Slaughterhouse-Five with its predecessor God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, balancing the hopeless predestination of the first and the empathy of the latter. And it finds a complex, engaging structure that works with the strengths of Vonnegut’s aphoristic and funny prose.

The novel follows a small-town car dealer named Dwayne Hoover on the day of a literary festival in the small town of Midland, Ohio. One of the guests of honor is impoverished science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, and another strand of the book follows Trout on his way to Midland. Meanwhile, Hoover’s going mad, affecting a cast of oddballs around him.

Near the end of the book, the two characters inevitably meet, their plot arcs coming into conjunction. Hoover reads one of Trout’s books, which suggests everybody in the universe except for one person is a robot. Hoover takes it literally, with various consequences, some tragic and some surprising.

The plot, though intricate, is only a part of the strangeness of the book. (Unfortunately, the 1999 film adaptation with Bruce Willis as Hoover focused on the story; Willis tries his best and does what he can with what he has, but the main service the movie provides is to demonstrate the power of Vonnegut’s prose and narrative voice, neither of which are replicated on film.) To start with, the pages include not only words but thick-lined cartoons drawn by Vonnegut, usually accompanied by equally simple and direct sentences defining whatever’s being illustrated.

Vonnegut’s always been adept at prose that reads simply but packs a sardonic punch precisely because it’s simple, and here the cartoons give him another level of representation to play with. There’s a complex blend of tones, at times like the dry exposition in that other great science-fiction satire The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, while at other times small and simple tragedies undercut the pleasure of the sardonic style.

If the diction’s simple, the variety of experience the book describes is even richer than in most other Vonnegut works. We live in the heads of minor characters of different classes, gender and race. We see different businesses and structures in Midland. We get metafictional touches, with Vonnegut a minor character in the book. We end up with a partial but convincing reflection of America in 1973; and Vonnegut’s perception is acute enough that speaks directly to 2026.

Hoover’s solipsism, his belief that everyone else is a robot, reads like the conviction of billionaires and 4channers that other people are NPCs lacking interiority. Vonnegut, continually and disturbingly prescient, diagnosed not only his times but ours, identifying a characteristic of American thinking both then and now: the habit of imagining oneself the sole actor with agency, the egocentricity of imagining everyone else in the world is an automaton.

It’s not true that everyone in the book other than Hoover is a robot. It is true that they, like Hoover, live within a complicated economic system that acts like an elaborate machine and has the effect of reducing them to parts of the machinery.

If you see the characters’ internal mental states, you see who they are and how they feel about their lives. If you see them from the outside, you may see aspects of their romantic and sexual and artistic selves, but you mostly see the difficulty of fitting those things into the society around them. And you see how that society shapes them for its own ends.

That’s probably most obvious with a cross-dressing employee of Hoover who lives in a state of constant fear that his non-normative sexuality will be exposed. It’s also clear with Hoover’s secretary and mistress, who unintentionally starts a quarrel with Hoover when he thinks she’s asking him to invest in a business scheme.

The tension of individual freedom and external limitations underlies much of the book. The arts festival that sets Trout in motion, and sets up his meeting with Hoover, is funded by Eliot Rosewater, a fantastically rich man who inherited his wealth; it’s slightly unreal, disconnected from the world of work and striving that Dwayne Hoover and everybody else has to deal with.

The book questions what an individual is. Are humans nothing more than products of their society and neurochemistry? Dwayne goes mad because of “bad chemicals;” is that really the key to his character and actions?

In the end, the book’s an argument that there’s more to life than bad chemicals and all the forces that make us act only as we must. There’s art, however compromised or ignored, and there’s empathy. We’re not machines, and we can show that by reaching out to others. We live in a complex world, the book tells us, and much is out of our control, but we’re only lost if we let it dehumanize us by dehumanizing others.