Breakfast of Champions - Kurt Vonnegut

Read for the second time in February 2013.

I read "Breakfast of Champions" for the first time about 12 years ago in the midst of a Vonnegut reading frenzy. Elements stuck out for me over the years. In this one, Vonnegut relays one of my favorite aborted stories of his about two yeast cells, consuming sugar and shitting out alcohol, slowly killing themselves in the process. The talk to each other about why they are doing this, neither one with the imagination to realize that they are making champagne. I also remembered the main plot about a mentally ill man coming to believe he was the only person with free will in the universe thanks to a book by Kilgore Trout.

A lot of it, I did not remember at all though. It did not completely hold up for me as among one of Vonnegut's best works. he flaws are more apparent to me now, than they were those many years ago, speed-reading through Vonnegut without digesting. I think things I think are flaws now, I might've thought were strengths back then. Back then I was in awe of Vonnegut's crazy imagination. Now, I think maybe he was a frustrated short story writer, shoehorning aborted ideas into novels where they might not have really fit.

Of course, Vonnegut is still funny. He's still entertaining. His ideas should be read more broadly. I still firmly believe that America would be a better place if more people read and took Vonnegut seriously. In "Breakfast of Champions," which I read in order to take a break from Nietzsche's "Thus Spoke Zararthustra" (which is great but slow going for me), Vonnegut wrestles in his accessible way with materialism (In the Hegelian philosophical sense) and his cheery nihilism finds itself at battle with his humanism.

To Vonnegut, the line between inanimate machines and animate ones is a very thin one. Vonnegut, here, wrestles with the implications that human actions are involuntary responses to chemical reactions. That human beings behave very much like machines. There is also quite a bit of presenting the absurdity of the world we live in by conveying the world we live in as if it were a strange world in a science fiction novel. That is, he is writing in a style of fantastic science fiction, but about the mundane world we live in and recognize, not a fantastic one. At its best it satirizes human folly. At its worst, it's a little bit too cute, and almost as bad as some of the whimsical bullshit that would follow in Vonnegut's wake.

Vonnegut also tries to strike some personal notes in this. I'm not sure the story isn't better without them. I'm not sure the story isn't better without Vonnegut in it either. And certainly, I don't think this book ends on a strong note. Nonetheless, Vonnegut is almost always entertaining and he's almost always interesting as well. "Breakfast of Champions" is no exception, despite some apparent flaws, it is still a work worthy of great admiration.