Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

Kilgore Trout is a widely published, but ignored and virtually invisible writer who is invited to deliver a keynote address at a local arts festival in distant Midland City. Dwayne Hoover is a wealthy businessman who owns much in Midland City, but is becoming increasingly mentally unstable. The novel is achronological and frequently shifts focus between Hoover and Trout, as well as supporting characters like Wayne Hoobler, a man who wants to work under Hoover, and Kurt Vonnegut himself, who appears as the author of the book, having power over the world and his characters' actions. "The novel's structure is a simple one", as Jerome Klinkowitz has written, "yet it employs simultaneously evolving plots from different times and spaces." The novel starts with Vonnegut writing in the first person; he notes that in the book he expresses a suspicion that human beings are machines, and states that "when I create a character for a novel, [I say] that he is what he is because of faulty wiring, or because of microscopic amounts of chemicals which he ate or failed to eat on that particular day." Vonnegut says he's going to purge himself of mental clutter, and, throughout the novel, can be found examining and refuting disparate concepts, from the 'discovery' of the new world in 1492 to euphemisms for genitalia. When Trout arrives in Midland City, he piques the interest of Dwayne. A confused Dwayne demands a message from Trout, who hands over a copy of a novel he brought for the festival. Dwayne reads the novel, which purports to be a message from the Creator of the Universe explaining that the reader – in this case Dwayne – is the only individual in the universe with free will and that everyone else is a machine. Dwayne takes the novel as factual and, now believing other people to be machines, goes on a violent rampage, severely beating his son, his lover, and nine other people before being taken into custody. While Trout is walking to the now-postponed festival after Dwayne's rampage, the Vonnegut character approaches Trout. He tells Trout he is the Creator of the Universe; that he is only telling Trout this, out of all his other literary creations; and that he is "freeing" Trout in the same way "Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves". The Vonnegut character disappears and somersaults "lazily and pleasantly through the void", hearing Trout cry to him in the last words of the novel, "Make me young, make me young, make me young!"