Breakfast of Champions

A novel with drawings

The first edition says on its title page that the drawings are by the author. Kurt Vonnegut drew them with a felt-tip marker. They are simple, rough sketches of everyday things, from a Volkswagen to an electric chair.

The drawings go with a way of writing. Kurt Vonnegut often explains ordinary things as if the reader had never met them. In Chapter 2 he spells out what "take a leak" means, and defines charm as a scheme for getting strangers to trust you at once. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, reviewing the book in The New York Times, liked the drawings at first and said they began to wear on him.

Kilgore Trout

Kilgore Trout first appeared in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater in 1965 and came back in Slaughterhouse-Five. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction says Trout was based partly on the science-fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, with parts of Vonnegut's own life mixed in. The Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library notes that Vonnegut often described Trout as looking like his own father as an old man.

Breakfast of Champions gives Trout a leading role. He has odd habits. He calls mirrors leaks, pretending they are holes into another universe, and warns children not to get too close. The narrator adds that by the time Trout died, everybody called mirrors leaks.

The book also summarizes many of Trout's stories. One follows a bachelor scientist who learns to grow copies of himself in chicken soup and becomes famous as a family man. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt counted a dozen or so such summaries and wished some had been written out as whole books.

The author walks into his own novel

Kurt Vonnegut is a character in Breakfast of Champions. He moves Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout around Midland City and arranges what happens to them. Kirkus Reviews noted that in his fiftieth year he announced he would stop telling stories and write about life instead.

At the end he meets Trout and tells him he is setting free all the characters who have served him in his books. He compares himself to Leo Tolstoy freeing his serfs and Thomas Jefferson freeing his slaves. The one thing he cannot or will not do, the museum's reader points out, is make Trout young again.

Not every reader was won over. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt admired the book's jokes and its satire of American racism, greed and wasted language. He was bothered by its repeated "Listen" and "And so on," and asked whether Vonnegut was just kidding his readers about giving up fiction.

Midland City and the rest of Kurt Vonnegut's books

Midland City, Ohio, is invented, and Kurt Vonnegut used it again as the setting of Deadeye Dick. Several people in Breakfast of Champions turn up in other books. Rabo Karabekian, a painter at the arts festival, later narrates Bluebeard. Dwayne's dead wife, Celia, appears in Deadeye Dick and Galápagos.

Because of these links, the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library's suggested reading order puts Breakfast of Champions last of the fourteen novels. A reader who knows the other books will catch more of the references.

Breakfast of Champions in Paris

The French translation came out in Paris a year after the original. Seuil published Guy Durand's translation in 1974 as Le Breakfast du champion, in its Fiction & Cie series. Forty years later the Paris publisher Gallmeister brought out a new translation by Gwilym Tonnerre, Le Petit Déjeuner des champions. The new French title uses the ordinary French word for breakfast.