Breakfast of Champions

by

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut Character Analysis

The author of Breakfast of Champions and “the Creator” of all the characters. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s fiftieth birthday present to himself, and he uses it as means to “cleanse” his mind and rid it of all the nonsense that has accumulated there. The things in Vonnegut’s mind—the destruction of the planet, mental illness, systemic racism, and the uneven distribution of wealth—are “useless and ugly” and “don’t fit together nicely.” Through his novel, he “throws out” these social injustices and others, and he even “throws out” characters from past novels. “I’m not going to put on anymore puppet shows,” Vonnegut writes. As Vonnegut writes, he repeatedly interjects to offer insight into characters and situations, to provide background information and context, or simply to remind the reader that the book and everyone in it is his creation. Like Dwayne Hoover, Vonnegut struggles with his own mental health. He frequently mentions taking medication, so he doesn’t “feel blue,” and he even talks about Martha, his psychiatrist, whom he “likes a lot.” Vonnegut depicts his own mental illness, as well as others’, to destigmatize and normalize mental illness. He argues for visibility and help, and he implores readers to notice and act when they witness mental illness and suffering in others. Vonnegut pushes his metafictional novel even further yet, and when his characters converge at the Arts Festival in Midland City, he enters the lounge at the Holiday Inn. There, “incognito” behind a pair of mirrored sunglasses, Vonnegut is “transformed” by Rabo Karabekian’s painting, The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Vonnegut refers to his transformation as “the spiritual climax of the book,” during which he is reminded that everyone, including his characters, possesses a “sacred” and deep “unwavering band of light.” In this way, Vonnegut reminds his readers that all humans are sentient beings who deserve to be respected and heard. Ultimately, Vonnegut comes face-to-face with his character, Kilgore Trout, and grants him his “freedom.” Even Kilgore has an “unwavering band of light,” and as such, is not right for Vonnegut to own him. When Vonnegut sets Kilgore free, he metaphorically rejects all forms of slavery and discrimination.

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes in Breakfast of Champions

The Breakfast of Champions quotes below are all either spoken by Kurt Vonnegut or refer to Kurt Vonnegut. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Art, Subjectivity, and Absurdity Theme Icon
).
Preface Quotes

I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes—there is a picture in this book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books, too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.”

The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

The teachers told the children that [1492] was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.

And so on.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world—in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases.

But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”

Related Characters: Kilgore Trout (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six dollars, C.O.D.

“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

Related Characters: Dwayne Hoover (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[The truck driver] had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

Then Trout made a good point, too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There’s a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, ‘More power to Standard Oil,’ or whoever it was that dumped it.” Trout raised his arms in celebration. “‘Up your ass with Mobil gas,’” he said.

Related Characters: Kilgore Trout (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), The Truck Driver
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

The young man went back to burnishing the automobile. His life was not worth living. He had a feeble will to survive. He thought the planet was terrible, that he never should have been sent there. Some mistake had been made. He had no friends or relatives. He was put in cages all the time.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Young Black Man / Wayne Hoobler
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:

“Our names are so close,” said the young man, “it’s the good Lord telling us both what to do.”

Dwayne Hoover didn’t ask him what his name was, but the young man told him anyway, radiantly: “My name, sir, is Wayne Hoobler.”

All around Midland City, Hoobler was a common Nigger name.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Young Black Man / Wayne Hoobler (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it. Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves, were sliding into valleys now.

The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State Government, which drew their power from the people.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Drāno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), George / Bunny Hoover, Celia Hoover
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia.

The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.

I did not and do not know for certain that I have that disease. This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Related Symbols: Mirrors
Page Number: 198-199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Harold Newcomb Wilbur
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Rabo Karabekian, Beatrice Keedsler
Related Symbols: Paintings
Page Number: 214-215
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

“I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout,” I said. “I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.”

“You are the only one I am telling. For the others, tonight will be a night like any other night. Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free.”

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Breakfast of Champions LitChart as a printable PDF.
Breakfast of Champions PDF

Kurt Vonnegut Quotes in Breakfast of Champions

The Breakfast of Champions quotes below are all either spoken by Kurt Vonnegut or refer to Kurt Vonnegut. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Art, Subjectivity, and Absurdity Theme Icon
).
Preface Quotes

I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants. Yes—there is a picture in this book of underpants. I’m throwing out characters from my other books, too. I’m not going to put on any more puppet shows.

I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.

I suspect that this is something most white Americans, and nonwhite Americans who imitate white Americans, should do. The things other people have put into my head, at any rate, do not fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it really is outside my head.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 5
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

The motto of Dwayne Hoover’s and Kilgore Trout’s nation was this, which meant in a language nobody spoke anymore, Out of Many, One: “E pluribus unum.”

The undippable flag was a beauty, and the anthem and the vacant motto might not have mattered much, if it weren’t for this: a lot of citizens were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country, or even on the wrong planet, that some terrible mistake had been made. It might have comforted them some if their anthem and their motto had mentioned fairness or brotherhood or hope or happiness, had somehow welcomed them to the society and its real estate.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

The teachers told the children that [1492] was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492. That was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill them.

Here was another piece of evil nonsense which children were taught: that the sea pirates eventually created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 10
Explanation and Analysis:

A lot of the people on the wrecked planet were Communists. They had a theory that what was left of the planet should be shared more or less equally among all the people, who hadn’t asked to come to a wrecked planet in the first place. Meanwhile, more babies were arriving all the time—kicking and screaming, yelling for milk.

In some places people would actually try to eat mud or suck on gravel while babies were being born just a few feet away.

And so on.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 12-13
Explanation and Analysis:

It shook up Trout to realize that even he could bring evil into the world—in the form of bad ideas. And, after Dwayne was carted off to a lunatic asylum in a canvas camisole, Trout became a fanatic on the importance of ideas as causes and cures for diseases.

But nobody would listen to him. He was a dirty old man in the wilderness, crying out among the trees and underbrush, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!”

Related Characters: Kilgore Trout (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

Dwayne stayed in his vacant lot for a while. He played the radio. All the Midland City stations were asleep for the night, but Dwayne picked up a country music station in West Virginia, which offered him ten different kinds of flowering shrubs and five fruit trees for six dollars, C.O.D.

“Sounds good to me,” said Dwayne. He meant it. Almost all the messages which were sent and received in his country, even the telepathic ones, had to do with buying or selling some damn thing. They were like lullabies to Dwayne.

Related Characters: Dwayne Hoover (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Page Number: 53
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

[The truck driver] had a point. The planet was being destroyed by manufacturing processes, and what was being manufactured was lousy, by and large.

Then Trout made a good point, too. “Well,” he said, “I used to be a conservationist. I used to weep and wail about people shooting bald eagles with automatic shotguns from helicopters and all that, but I gave it up. There’s a river in Cleveland which is so polluted that it catches fire about once a year. That used to make me sick, but I laugh about it now. When some tanker accidently dumps its load in the ocean, and kills millions of birds and billions of fish, I say, ‘More power to Standard Oil,’ or whoever it was that dumped it.” Trout raised his arms in celebration. “‘Up your ass with Mobil gas,’” he said.

Related Characters: Kilgore Trout (speaker), Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), The Truck Driver
Page Number: 86
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

The young man went back to burnishing the automobile. His life was not worth living. He had a feeble will to survive. He thought the planet was terrible, that he never should have been sent there. Some mistake had been made. He had no friends or relatives. He was put in cages all the time.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Young Black Man / Wayne Hoobler
Page Number: 99
Explanation and Analysis:

“Our names are so close,” said the young man, “it’s the good Lord telling us both what to do.”

Dwayne Hoover didn’t ask him what his name was, but the young man told him anyway, radiantly: “My name, sir, is Wayne Hoobler.”

All around Midland City, Hoobler was a common Nigger name.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Young Black Man / Wayne Hoobler (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 101
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

The surface of West Virginia, with its coal and trees and topsoil gone, was rearranging what was left of itself in conformity with the laws of gravity. It was collapsing into all the holes which had been dug into it. Its mountains, which had once found it easy to stand by themselves, were sliding into valleys now.

The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the State Government, which drew their power from the people.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout
Page Number: 123
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 15 Quotes

It didn’t matter much what Dwayne said. It hadn’t mattered much for years. It didn’t matter much what most people in Midland City said out loud, except when they were talking about money or structures or travel or machinery—or other measurable things. Every person had a clearly defined part to play—as a black person, a female high school drop-out, a Pontiac dealer, a gynecologist, a gas-conversion burner installer. If a person stopped living up to expectations, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyway.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Dwayne Hoover
Page Number: 146
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17 Quotes

Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Drāno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), George / Bunny Hoover, Celia Hoover
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

There in the cocktail lounge, peering out through my leaks at a world of my own invention, I mouthed this word: schizophrenia.

The sound and appearance of the word had fascinated me for many years. It sounded and looked to me like a human being sneezing in a blizzard of soapflakes.

I did not and do not know for certain that I have that disease. This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker)
Related Symbols: Mirrors
Page Number: 198-199
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 19 Quotes

And he went on staring at me, even though I wanted to stop him now. Here was the thing about my control over the characters I created: I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubberbands.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Harold Newcomb Wilbur
Page Number: 207
Explanation and Analysis:

I had no respect whatsoever for the creative works of either the painter or the novelist. I thought Karabekian with his meaningless pictures had entered into a conspiracy with millionaires to make poor people feel stupid. I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Rabo Karabekian, Beatrice Keedsler
Related Symbols: Paintings
Page Number: 214-215
Explanation and Analysis:
Epilogue Quotes

“I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout,” I said. “I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs. Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.”

“You are the only one I am telling. For the others, tonight will be a night like any other night. Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free.”

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), Kilgore Trout
Page Number: 301
Explanation and Analysis: