Breakfast of Champions Recap

“Kilgore Trout once wrote a short story which was a dialogue between two pieces of yeast. They were discussing the possible purposes of life as they ate sugar and suffocated in their own excrement. Because of their limited intelligence, they never came close to guessing that they were making champagne.” 

If Breakfast of Champions were a collection of stones, this would be one of the crown jewels.  I love this metaphors because it manages so much with so little.  It's a hypothesis on the meaning of life--and the impossibility of ever understanding the meaning of life.  It's a way of encouraging people to come to terms with the notion of just how limited our knowledge really is.  It pokes fun at the fundamentally human tendency for people to ignore or fail to understand where they sit in the grand scheme of things.  

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“The girl with the greyhound was an assistant lighting director for a musical comedy about American history, and she kept her poor greyhound, who was named Lancer, in a one-room apartment fourteen feet wide and twenty-six feet long, and six flights of stairs above the street level. His entire life was devoted to unloading his excrement at the proper time and place. There were two proper places to put it: in the gutter outside the door seventy-two steps below, with the traffic whizzing by, or in a roasting pan, his mistress kept in front of the Westinghouse refrigerator.

Lancer had a very small brain, but he must have suspected from time to time...that some kind of terrible mistake had been made.”

I love this one.  "A musical comedy about American history."  In the context of the opening of portions of the book--which include a scathing take on the more unsavory aspects of American history [like colonization (sea pirates) and slavery (agricultural machines)]--this is delightfully ironic.  The way Vonnegut hides it in the middle of a sentence is also classic.  

The fact that the woman's greyhound is named Lancer is also notable.  A Lancer was a kind of cavalry warrior who fought with a spear in the "olden days."  The disconnect between Lancer's name/purpose and his actual function (to unload excrement), is directly followed with the section where the greyhound suspects that "some kind of terrible mistake had been made."  Lancer, in other words, is anything but a lancer.  He as mistakenly been placed into the wrong life. 

This idea of the "terrible mistake" is an important one, and becomes a recurring motif in Breakfast of Champions--a subtle way for characters to break the fourth wall, and express frustration with the absurd universe Vonnegut has created for them.  It is a key part of the philosophy in Breakfast of Champions.

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“As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tis-sues?  Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.  And so on.  Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling.  I would write about life.  Every person would be exactly as important as any other.  All facts would also be given equal weightiness.  Nothing would be left out.  Let others bring order to chaos.  I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.  If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.  It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done.  I am living proof of that: It can be done.” 

Vonnegut asks us to think critically about storytelling here, and the way narratives we develop can have a powerful effect on the way we shape and understand our universe.  The way I see it, Vonnegut is saying the stories we tell others are the stories we tell ourselves--the way we actually understand the world.   We have to craft our stories carefully, because those stories are the shortcuts that allow us to make [illusory] sense of the world around us.  Real life is something closer to chaos--a chaos both incomprehensibly large and violently, frustratingly meaningless.  

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“Trout was petrified there on Forty-second Street.  I had given him a life not worth living, but I had also given him an iron will to live.  This was a common combination on the planet Earth."

Vonnegut poses a question for us without trying to answer it: why do we continue our lives if they're not worth living?  Or going further: is all life worth living?

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“Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.” 

Vonnegut playfully breaks the fourth wall here, encouraging his readers to do the same with their own lives.  Are we just filler characters in some universal narrative?  Is god a screenwriter?