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May 01, 2007
Breakfast of Champions (with bad punctuation!!)--
Categories: Words
A couple of weeks ago, right after we brought Eleanor home from the hospital, I was searching for something to read. Remembering that Kurt Vonnegut just died and feeling bad for having only read Slaughterhouse Five once a long time ago, I checked out Breakfast of Champions from the Winthrop Library. I finished it the night before last and enjoyed it immensely; it makes me sad Vonnegut has passed away.
There were many things I thought made the book great -- the matter of fact style, the humor, the inclusion of the "and so ons" -- but two things really stood out -- the self-referentiality of the author/narrator and the thematic tension between the sacred and the profane (and I know I just used three dashes, a hyphen, and now a set of parenthesis in one sentence).
I always enjoy it when a narrator reveals himself. I think it's an interesting conceit that, if done well, can really make the reader think about his or her own subjectivity and place qua reader. Another layer is added when the narrator reveals himself as author and creator, as Vonnegut does here. Now, it does not seem novel -- I think of Stephen King writing himself into The Dark Tower books and Eggers self-conscious memoir AHWOSG. But it's always risky. And it must have been really risky and novel in 1977.
As for the tension between the sacred and the profane (or the human and the transcendent, or machine and man, or however you want to construct it), it shows up in a number of my favorite sections of the novel:
"our awareness if all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us."
"At the core of each person who reads this book is a band of unwavering light."
Vonnegut describes this as his "spiritual climax". But can a book have a real spiritual climax when the author as character says "Now comes the spiritual climax. . .", especially after most of the book is spent demonstrating how humans are nothing more than complex biological machines linked by coincidence, which is made even more ironic because it's not all concidence, because the author is in the book telling us he made all the other characters do exactly what they are doing? It's complex and wonderful!
I also noted this sentence, which is oddly and sadly prescient given the Virginia Tech shootings:
"[Americans] were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convienient literary device for ending short stories and books." Wasn't the guy a VA Tech after, not just revenge for perceived wrongs, but for a "storied" ending to his life? For all of my education talk about making meaning, I have to remember one way to make meaning for oneself is to hurt others, to write a narrative that puts onself at the center of a bloody story that ends badly for everyone concerned.
So, I really enjoyed Breakfast of Champions.
And so on.
Posted by Nakia at May 1, 2007 07:31 PM