Breakfast of Champions

"We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy.Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning."

Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions

I am constantly amazed how relevant all of Vonneguts books are, even years after they were written. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater took a scathing look the distribution of wealth, Cat's Cradle at what makes creations destructive and the role science and technology plays, and Breakfast of Champions was no exception. Following the lives of Kilgore Trout, a science fiction writer who's works are only published in porn magazines and who assisted Mr. Rosewater in his recovery, and Dwayne Hoover, a used car salesman who starts mistaking Trouts fiction for reality, Breakfast of Champions takes a good look at sex, politics, pollution and racism in America. 

This book was wonderful. Filled to the brim with Vonnegut's witty one-liners and satiric passages. I loved this book. It had

this wonderful, absurd aspect of the writer interacting with the characters he has created and had the added layer of drawings throughout the book, both of which added an additional dimension to the book. The characters were all fairly complex, and I loved how Vonnegut awarded quite a bit of page time and backstory to his minor characters, as if he's implying that even though there time is brief in the story, they still have their own separate story that matters just as much.

I really loved how the book showed how absurd it is to treat people as objects and machines, and how the lack of this humanity affects people in an extremely negative way. This idea was extremely poignant, especially with the tragedy that has happened in South Carolina this week, and the speculation surrounding those murders, especially with regards to race. There is a huge racial wound in the country that we cannot seem to heal, and I think a large part of why is because of the denial that it exists. We cannot seem to grasp that people are not stand ins, they aren't machines and they aren't less than anyone else.

This book was wonderful and I highly recommend it.  Vonnegut doesn't disappoint.

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane"

Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions