Within the first ten pages I knew Kurt Vonnegut and I would have trouble getting along. He makes it very clear he is a communist. An idea I can't even begin to understand and immediately feel hatred towards. As someone who avidly supports capitalism, reading the narrator bash the hell out of it wasn't the easiest thing to sit through. But of course, you must put things like this aside when judging the quality of a book.
Vonnegut writes like a science fiction author in Breakfast of Champions. The catch is that the planet he is writing about is earth and his characters are fairly realistic ones. But the way he does this gets tiring, very fast. He over explains the simplistic things found on earth in an attempt to be charming but by the time a paragraph long explanation of a clock rolls around, you feel worn out. There are small illustrations all throughout the book to give you an idea of how some of these things he talks about look. After the explanation and before the picture, Vonnegut always writes "which looks like this" and about halfway through the book it was driving me crazy.
Shifting to the actual content of the book, you spend the book split between two characters. Both are old white men searching for answers to some of life's biggest questions. Kilgore, the more bearable of the two is an obscure science fiction author with each new book he writes he tries to grasp some idea of what life is really about. The stories vary from aliens coming to earth without the ability to translate any ideas they have to help earthlings to a story of two pieces of yeast talking. The other character, Dwayne can't seem to make up his mind on life's meaning and often busies himself with other things.
Meanwhile in The Stranger, Albert Camus is pondering the same thing as Vonnegut's characters albeit in a more articulate and effective way. Meursault, is a man who doesn't seem to care about much. If he were keep living or die it wouldn't make any difference to him. Unfortunately when he is involved in a murder this attitude finds him in jail facing execution. In his jail cell Meursault is visited by a priest who attempts to convert him to Christianity in order for God to forgive him. This is the point where the book reaches its climax, Meursault explodes at the man and begins to explain how nothing he will say to him matters. To him humans go through thinking they will find an answer but they never do. It seems like looking for an answer becomes a sick game everyone gets caught up when maybe the right thing to do should be experiencing life as Camus says Meursault "I felt ready to live it all again too" (Camus 122).
Everyone in Breaskfast of Champions falls into this trap, all people who spend far too much time looking for why they are on earth to enjoy being there. The one that agrees with Camus' theory somewhat but the one I liked the most comes from a Trout talking to a truck driver. "I can't tell if you're serious or not," said the driver. "I won't know myself until I found out whether life is serious or not..." (Vonnegut 88). Maybe I should stop worrying about where me and Vonnegut disagree and develop my own ideas or maybe I should be thinking about more joyful things. In the end, with one of his simple illustrations Vonnegut sums all of this up:
