Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 19 Summary & Analysis

“I am on par with the Creator of the Universe here in the dark in the cocktail lounge,” Vonnegut says. As Bonnie MacMahon brings him another drink, she eyes him suspiciously. “Can you see anything in the dark, with your sunglasses on?” she asks. “The big show is inside my head,” Vonnegut answers. She nods and goes back to the bar, where she tells the bartender, Harold Newcomb Wilbur, about their strange customer.

Harold stares at Vonnegut, and Vonnegut wants him to stop, but he can’t force him. “Here is the thing about my control over the characters I create,” Vonnegut says. “I can only guide their movements approximately, since they are such big animals. There is inertia to overcome.” Vonnegut explains that he is not connected to his characters “by steel wires,” but by “stale rubberbands.” Vonnegut makes the telephone ring to distract Harold, so he won’t kick him out.

Harold is the second most decorated veteran in Midland City. He was awarded several medals during the Second World War, “which was staged by robots so that Dwayne Hoover could give a free-willed reaction to such a holocaust.” The phone is ringing because Vonnegut makes Ned Lingamon, the most decorated veteran in Midland City, call Harold. “Don’t hang up,” Ned says to Harold. “The cops got me down at City Jail. They only let me have one call, so I called you.”

As Harold talks to Ned, Vonnegut draws a colorless representation of Rabo Karabekian’s painting, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, on his tabletop. The Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts has purchased the painting for fifty thousand dollars. The painting, which is twenty feet wide and sixteen feet high, is a green square with a “vertical stripe of dayglo orange reflecting tape.” The cost of the painting is a “scandal,” and the whole city is “outraged” that the center has paid so much for such a simple painting. “So am I,” Vonnegut says.

Beatrice Keedsler is “dismayed” that Rabo has been paid so much money. Still, she hides her feelings and converses politely with him. “This is a dreadful confession,” she says to Rabo, “but I don’t even know who St. Anthony was.” Rabo tells her that he doesn’t know either and doesn’t really care. “You have no use for truth?” Beatrice asks. “You know what truth is?” says Rabo. “It’s some crazy thing my neighbor believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say, ‘Yeah, yeah—ain’t it the truth?’”

“I have no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist,” Vonnegut says. Rabo, it seems, has “entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid,” and Beatrice has “joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers” who believe life, like literature, has “lessons to be learned.” It is because of artists like Rabo and Beatrice, Vonnegut says, that Americans “behave so abominably.” Everyone is “doing their best to live like people invented in story books.” So, writes Vonnegut, “I resolve to shun storytelling.”

“Let others bring order to chaos,” Vonnegut says. “I will bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.” If other writers did this, according to Vonnegut, then perhaps people “will understand that there is no order in the world arounds us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.”

Bonnie brings Rabo another martini. “Breakfast of Champions,” she says again as she places the drink in front of him. Rabo tells Bonnie that she said that the last time she brought him a martini. “I say it every time I give anybody a martini,” Bonnie says. She tries to be friendly, since she works for tips, and even though she “detests” Rabo, she continues to smile.

Rabo asks Bonnie about Mary Alice Miller, the girl on the cover of the program for the Festival. Mary Alice is the Queen of the Festival, and she is also an Olympic Gold Medalist and the Women’s Two Hundred Meter Breast Stroke Champion of the World. She is a local celebrity, and her father had taught her to swim when she was just eight months old. “What kind of a man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor?” Rabo asks.

“And now comes the spiritual climax of this book,” Vonnegut interrupts, “for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far.” When Rabo questions Mary Alice Miller, he essentially questions Midland City as well, and makes the people worry that “their lives might be ridiculous.” Rabo, “a man from out-of-town,” has “ridiculed” their lives. “Oh yeah?” Bonnie yells. “Oh, yeah? You don’t think much of Mary Alice Miller?” she asks. “Well, we don’t think much of your painting. I’ve seen better pictures done by a five-year-old.”

“Listen,” says Rabo. “I have read the editorial against my painting in your wonderful newspaper.” Rabo is aware that Midland City doesn’t like his painting, but he doesn’t care. “The painting did not exist until I made it,” he says, and it “shows everything about life which truly matters.” It is a rendition of the “awareness of every animal,” the “immaterial core” that is at the center of each living thing. He calls it an “unwavering band of light,” and it is “all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery,” he explains.