Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 4 Summary & Analysis

In the meantime, Dwayne is “getting crazier.” He hallucinates a large “duck directing traffic” in an intersection but tells no one. “He maintains secrecy,” but his “bad chemicals” are done with secrecy. They want Dwayne “to do queer things” as well, “and make a lot of noise.”

After Dwayne goes publicly crazy, people who know him are “furious with themselves” for ignoring his “obvious cries for help.” The local paper runs an editorial called “A CRY FOR HELP,” and Francine Pefko, Dwayne’s “white secretary and mistress,” the woman who knows him best, claims that he appeared “happier” before losing his mind. “I kept thinking,” Francine says, “‘he is finally getting over his wife’s suicide.’”

Francine works at Dwayne Hoover’s Exit Eleven Pontiac Village. The dealership is near the interstate, next to the new Holiday Inn. She recalls that Dwayne began to sing a lot before going crazy, old songs from his childhood like “Blue Moon.” The “black bus boy” and the “black waiter” in the lounge at the Holiday Inn think Dwayne’s singing is strange but expected. “If I owned what he owns, I’d sing, too,” the waiter says.

Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s “white sales manager,” is the only person to notice Dwayne’s change in mental status, and he talks to Francine about it. “Something has come over Dwayne,” Harry says. “I don’t find him so charming anymore.” Harry has known Dwayne for over twenty years and first began working for him when the dealership was “right on the edge of the Nigger part of town. A Nigger,” Vonnegut says, “is a human being who is black.” Before the dealership moved to the interstate, they were constantly robbed. “I know him the way a combat soldier knows his buddy,” Harry tells Francine. Something is wrong with Dwayne.

“Listen:” Harry tells Francine that Dwayne is “changing.” Harry can feel it. He tells Francine to go ask Vernon Garr, Dwayne’s longtime mechanic, what he thinks, but Vernon has noticed nothing. Vernon’s wife, Mary, is “schizophrenic” and believes that Vernon is “trying to turn her brains to plutonium,” so he hasn’t really been paying attention to Dwayne. Francine tells Harry that Dwayne is “human like anybody else.” He has had “a few bad days” is all, and they should cut him some slack. After all, he is the best employer in town. 

Harry is “upset” with Dwayne because earlier that day he had gone into Dwayne’s office—as he always does, to make small talk—and Dwayne screamed at him. Harry was telling Dwayne that he is “sad sometimes” because he has no children, but he doesn’t want to “contribute to overpopulation.” Harry had said that perhaps he “should have adopted,” and Dwayne began to yell. Dwayne himself had been adopted, and this connection “caused an unfortunate chemical reaction in Dwayne’s head.” 

“Harry,” Dwayne said, “why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in Blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe? You make me feel like I’m at Watson Brothers.” Watson Brothers is the name of a local, upscale funeral parlor. Next week is “Hawaiian Week” at the dealership, a sales promotion in which customers win trips to Hawaii, and Dwayne told Harry not to bother showing up without new clothes. “I’m absolutely serious,” he told Harry. “Burn your clothes and get new ones, or apply for work at Watson Brothers.”

Harry was shocked by Dwayne’s outburst. Harry is “generally acknowledged to be one of the most effective sales managers” in all the Midwest, and Dwayne has never mentioned his clothes before. This outburst might not have mattered so much, but Harry is “a secret transvestite,” and he is convinced that Dwayne’s comment about his clothes means he knows his secret. Not only can Harry be arrested and fined thousands of dollars for dressing like a woman on the weekends, he can be given five years in the Sexual Offenders’ Wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown.

That weekend, the “bad chemicals” in Dwayne’s brain wake him in the middle of the night. He goes to the bathroom where he puts a “loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver” into his mouth. Where Dwayne lives, “anybody who wants [a gun] can get one down at his local hardware store.” With the gun in his mouth, Dwayne thinks about the bullet ripping through his brain, and then he removes the gun and shoots the picture of a flamingo that decorates his shower door. “Dumb fucking bird,” Dwayne says. 

No one hears the shots through Dwayne’s fancy, well-insulated home, and he walks outside to play basketball in his driveway and talk to his dog, Sparky. “You and me, Sparky,” he says to the dog. No one sees Dwayne in the driveway because he is blocked by tall shrubs. He stops playing basketball and climbs into a Plymouth Fury “he had taken in trade the day before.” As Dwayne drives away, he yells, “Keeping abreast of the competition!” so his neighbors won’t think it is strange that he is not driving a Pontiac.

As Dwayne races down the road, he “slams into a guardrail,” spins a few times, “jumps a curb,” and comes to a rest in a vacant lot. Since Dwayne owns the lot, he decides to sit awhile. No one sees or hears a thing, and the only cop on patrol is sleeping around the corner. Dwayne listens to advertisements on the radio trying to sell him trees and shrubs. Most messages “sent and received in [Dwayne’s] country,” Vonnegut writes, “have to do with buying or selling some damn thing.” As Dwayne sits there alone, the ads are “like lullabies” to him.