Mental Health Theme Analysis

After Dwayne Hoover’s wife, Celia, who incidentally is “crazy as a bedbug,” commits suicide by drinking Drāno (a drain-cleaning chemical), Dwayne begins to struggle with his own mental health. The stress of his wife’s death, in addition to his homosexual son, Bunny’s, revelation that he is really a woman, causes Dwayne to completely take leave of his senses, and he spirals into insanity, lashing out violently at his son and other innocent citizens of Midland City. Dwayne has “bats in his bell tower,” Vonnegut explains. “He is off his rocker. He isn’t playing with a full deck of cards.” Dwayne’s insanity progresses slowly, and while he presents with plenty of warning signs, they go largely ignored in Midland City. Vonnegut suggests that Dwayne’s community is complicit in the violence resulting from his mental breakdown, and he portrays mental illness as a widespread epidemic affecting nearly everyone in town. Dwayne and his wife are not the only characters in Breakfast of Champions suffering with mental illness in one form or another, and suicide is a common occurrence. In this way, Vonnegut highlights the prevalence of mental illness in American society, and argues the importance of recognizing warning signs, which all too often are ignored or minimalized.

Breakfast of Champions is riddled with portrayals of mental illness, and they are far from gentle. In the beginning of the novel, Vonnegut mentions that men with syphilis were “common spectacles in downtown Indianapolis and in circus crowds” when he was a boy. Their brains “were infested with carnivorous little corkscrews which could be seen only with a microscope,” and these corkscrews caused them to behave very strangely.

Vernon Garr, one of the employees in Dwayne’s Pontiac dealership, has a wife, Mary, who suffers from schizophrenia. Mary frequently hallucinates and thinks that Vernon is “trying to turn her brains into plutonium.” Bunny, who lives the life of a depressed hermit in a “flophouse” on Midland’s City’s “Skid Row,” responds “so grotesquely” to his father’s psychotic break that there is “talk of putting [him] in the booby hatch, too.” Vonnegut’s repeated references to mental illness underscores the frequency with which mental disorders occur in American society. There are very few characters who are not in some way touched by mental illness, and the same can be said for mainstream society as well.

As Dwayne begins to go insane, no one in his life pays much attention, and many people don’t even seem to notice, highlighting the common impulse to avoid sensitive topics like mental health. For example, although Dwayne is typically a kind and generous employer and friend, his long-time employee, Harry LeSabre, barely says a word when Dwayne attacks him out of the blue for wearing drab clothing. Dwayne threatens to fire Harry because of his boring neckties, and while this behavior is out of character for Dwayne, Harry tells no one, expect his wife, Grace, and Francine, Dwayne’s secretary. As a symptom of his insanity, Dwayne also develops echolalia, a condition that causes him to repeat the last words of every sentence spoken to him. Dwayne goes all over town repeating people and no one says a word about it.

It is only after Dwayne’s insanity culminates in a violent outburst in which he beats Bunny’s face into the keys a baby grand piano, that people claim to be “furious with themselves for not noticing the danger signals in Dwayne’s behavior, for ignoring his obvious cries for help.” The local newspaper publishes a “deeply sympathetic editorial” entitled “A Cry For Help,” which implores people “to watch each other for danger signals.” Midland City is appropriately concerned, but it is too late. Vonnegut argues that instead of watching Dwayne unravel and later commenting on it, if others had simply offered Dwayne some help, his breakdown may have been avoided.

Vonnegut furthers draws attention to mental illness when he writes of his personal struggles with mental health problems. Vonnegut claims that while Bunny’s mother drinks Drāno, his own mother had committed suicide years earlier by an overdose of sleeping pills, “which wasn’t nearly as horrible,” he says. Though Vonnegut’s novel is fictional, this is a true detail from the author’s life. Thus mental illness and suicide aren’t simply tropes in Vonnegut’s novel; they are rooted in his own life experiences.

Near the end of the novel, Vonnegut begins talking to himself and says, “this is a very bad book you’re writing.” Vonnegut replies, “I know.” He then tells himself: “You’re afraid you’ll kill yourself the way your mother did.” He answers, “I know.” Vonnegut is quite literally having a conversation with himself, which suggests that he isn’t well, but it also implies that he needs to talk about his mental health. In the absence of an actual person, he talks to himself. Sitting in a bar with the characters of Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut repeats the word “schizophrenia” to himself over and over again. The word has “fascinated” Vonnegut for years. He claims that he “did not and does not know for certain that he has this disease,” but he certainly makes himself “hideously uncomfortable” by not believing “what his neighbors believe.” Vonnegut’s willingness to disclose his own struggles with mental illness lends increased weight to his argument that mental illness is common and pernicious in American society.

In a way, Vonnegut himself reaches out for help, and he implies that his own illness goes far beyond occasional suicidal ideations. Vonnegut talks about little white pills that a doctor tells him to “take in moderation, two a day, in order not to feel blue,” which implies he needs daily medication to treat his own mental illness and function normally in society. Breakfast of Champions is Vonnegut’s attempt to destigmatize mental illness by acknowledging the realty and prevalence of mental disorders.