Hardcover, 295 pages
English language
Published April 23, 1973 by Delacorte Press.
Breakfast Of Champions is vintage Vonnegut. One of his favorite characters, aging writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.From the Trade Paperback edition.
Chaos, irony, dark humor, satire: everything you want from Vonnegut. So far this in my favorite one. Couldn't put it down. Looking forward to more Kilgore Trout.
Breakfast of Champions: or Goodbye Blue Monday by Kurt Vonnegut is a dark comedy on racism, war, consumerism and greed in America during the 70’s. The book follows two loners, an unknown Sci-Fi writer named Kilgore Trout and a car dealer owner Dwayne Hoover. Both their lives are intertwined by one of the books written by Trout and read by the already plagued with “bad chemicals”, Dwayne Hoover. The book, which Hoover believed was factual, sent him into a violent rampage. Vonnegut is a master satirist and always manages to write some unusual stories, though comparing this to Slaughterhouse Five, Breakfast of Champions comes up short. It was enjoyable to read, weird in a lot of parts (I really didn’t need to know everyone characters penis size), but overall worth the read.
I love Vonnegut, but this book disappointed me. Kurt's trademark absurdism ran amok in this book, with the result that the book just wasn't very coherent. It was funny in parts, but it seemed to lack an overall narrative arc, and therefore just wasn't very satisfying in the end.
