Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 1

One could do worse than have a wardrobe full of t-shirts with Vonnegut quotes on them.

Chapter 1 begins like this:

This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.

I don't know if mentioning the two characters are white is a tell that this book will have a little something to do with race relations in America or if it was more of a habit of writers living through the Civil Rights era. People don't often think of bias stemming from what is left out of what is said and assumed by the listener (I mean people who aren't Foucalt and Derrida). But Vonnegut could have left out the adjective "white" and most readers would have simply assumed the two characters were white being that they weren't described using a different adjective. This is a foundational part of systemic racism and also homophobia and all the other Othering that takes place in America. So to come right out and state that two of the central characters of this novel were "fairly old white men", Vonnegut's making a narrative choice and a declaration of perspective. These two characters are experiencing America through a very particular lens: white, male, and older. People didn't use the word privileged in the same way we regard it now in 1973 (or did they? What the fuck do I know?) but it's what Vonnegut's pointing out. These two men who are experiencing bad shit in America are doing so even though they're from a privileged class. They have some bad shit going down in a country Vonnegut's about to take the extreme piss out of for the rest of the chapter. The decentered point here, the unspoken bit, is, "Now imagine if you aren't male or white or older. Hoo boy!"

The Preface of this book explains some things about the book from the author's point of view. The first paragraph of the second chapter gives a tiny little synopsis of the story about to be told. I'd argue the book doesn't really start until the second section of the second chapter when Vonnegut begins with his tried and true classic method of slapping you in the face to get your attention:

Listen:

I didn't say it was a hard slap. But it's an odd thing to say in a silent medium. As a pedant, one knows it should be "Read:". But Vonnegut wants to remind us that we're being told a story in a grand oral tradition. And that we should pay attention. I'd probably have started with "Listen, Motherfucker," but then I never learned the definition of subtle. My role model for how to act out in public was Tanner from The Bad News Bears.

After the "Listen" part, Kurt Vonnegut punches America in the teeth, pushes her to the ground, and begins kicking her in the ribcage. Good for him.

I'm being hyperbolic and misogynistic. Although, to be fair to me (for once), the misogyny is only because we are raised to view America as feminine. The hyperbole, to be fair to me, is just my way. Sure, Kurt doesn't beat the shit out of America in this chapter. He just points out how fucking silly and arbitrary the things we're supposed to believe about it actually are. Kurt just wants people to realize, before he tells his story about America, that when you celebrate patriotism and all of America's trappings, you're worshiping a clown that keeps falling down and shitting itself. But it's not the country's fault! It's the people in charge who have said, "This is the way things are and these are the things you should believe, no matter how stupid we've made them!"

Here is another quote presented as evidence to the things I've written so far that lacked evidence. I will not tell you how the one provides evidence for the other for it is abundantly clear to me and so if you should ask me, "What does this have to do with the other?", I would sneer and believe you to be a dunderheaded illiterate.

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.

Kurt concludes the bit about America being silly by suggesting the national motto may as well have been "In nonsense is strength." But he's not done putting the screws to the myths of America. He's got some pretty hefty ones to go, some that idiot conservatives in 2026 would suggest were not even considerations until the radical left logged onto tumblr and began spouting them. But they've always been known because they're Truths which people in power who want to control and manipulate the way people see the world simply want to obliterate from mass consciousness. So Kurt goes on to discuss how a lot of the nonsense we learn about America isn't just silly; it's actually evil.

For example, teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy:

The teachers told the children that this 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.

See? This is why conservatives cannot like Kurt Vonnegut, no matter what they might think. To belong to their tribe, they must adamantly refuse to believe actual Truths about the world. They must openly espouse only what other members of their tribe espouse lest they be discarded like, well, like somebody who won't espouse the beliefs that conservatives have determined all conservatives believe. It's telling that conservatives came up with the term "virtue signaling" since signaling their "virtues" is all they do. It's how they think everybody acts because they know that if they don't wave a flag or praise God or kiss the ass of every military member they see in public, they'll be shunned by their peers. So they simply believe everybody is faking their lives to fit into a tribe. It's a pity they can't just be themselves and enjoy what they want without the constant fear of being abandoned. I think it's also why they strive so hard to make laws that force people to live and act in Christian or Conservative ways. Because they're angry that other people actually choose to be happy and joyful, that people simply do things that they want to do without fear of being disowned or despised.

All of this is evidence leading up to Kurt's conclusion about the terrible secret of this country and the men who founded it. Listen: it's racism.

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.

Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves.

The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent when the pirates arrived were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black.
     Color was everything.

It's at this point when Kurt puts on his steel-toed boots and really gets going on America's midsection. I was wrong about my hyperbole being too hyperbolic. Kurt just begins by writing, "Look at all this nonsense! Silly America!" And then he continues to point out how all of that silly nonsense was in service to a bunch of evil, greedy, selfish sons of bitches who fucked over the entire world to line their own pockets. And how those men and that world had a direct connection to the America of 1973, no matter how many brainwashed Christian dunderheads loudly proclaimed, "America is the greatest country on Earth!"

This isn't a review for R.F. Laird's The Boomer Bible but I might as well make it one even if R.F. Laird seems to have become a typical white reactionary who lost his mind. It's hard to believe how easily some people lose the plot of reality, especially when they wrote something so cutting and truthful and heartbreaking as The Boomer Bible. Also, I never received my $10,000 for finding the secret Christian symbol in the text, Laird. I mean, it was the same secret Christian symbol that Philip K. Dick saw after the pink light scrambled his brains and the secret Christian came to his door with his fish necklace. But, you know, I still figured it out! Pay up, buddy!

I mentioned The Boomer Bible because the Old Testament of The Boomer Bible discusses the history of civilization by telling the history of each Chosen Nation as it rises to power and then falls from its perch. It does this in incredibly hilarious and vulgar ways. A good example of the humor of the book is how one of the early chapters is The Book of Greeks. Following the Book of Greeks is "The Book of Romans. Otherwise known as the Second Book of Greeks." The final "historical" chapter in the book is The Book of Yanks because, well, they were, at the time, the current Chosen Nation and seemed like they would be for some time yet (is that time still? Or did it end in 2016? Or, more probably, 2001, on a particular morning in September). Kurt plays up this whole America as the Most Chosen Nation myth by pointing out how America became the richest nation in the world by simply threatening other nations with bombs and guns and "their capacity to astonish".

Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.

And so, you know, it continues to this day. I would say fuck Trump and Hegseth and Miller but I'm really more angry with all the idiots who bought into all of their bullshit and lies. So many friends and family members I had to abandon because they simply showed themselves to be gigantic dunderheaded illiterate non-thinking assholes. Buh-bye!

That "buh-bye" was me saying goodbye to all the useless trash whose time as my friends and family members is now done. It wasn't me ending this blog post! Kurt's not done with Chapter 1 yet! Although he is done bashing America, for the most part. He explains Communism which is just a scary word that was hijacked by more evil, nonsensical people when it really should have just meant "government based on the common good; on community; on acknowledging that nobody does anything by themselves, no matter how much Ayn Rand you've read (especially when Ayn Rand's own words in her stupid boring stories actually argue against what she thinks she's making them say! Have any of the people who worship her read Anthem? Do they fucking understand it says exactly the opposite of what she and they all think it does?! God, it's wall-to-wall illiterate dunderheads up in this house of a country!)". He points out that babies were being born into poverty all over the world and still Americans refused to help them because there was no law saying they had to help and they should only help if they want to but all the people with the money to help simply didn't want to, no matter how Christian they were. Perhaps because of how Christian they were!

The point of all of this is to begin the story by stating that Dwayne Hoover, the white Pontiac dealer, was incredibly wealthy when he met the incredibly poor Kilgore Trout, the white science fiction writer. These two characters are the main protagonists of the book although, in reality, all the characters are the main protagonists of the book, what with it being a Kurt Vonnegut novel and all. Also the black Wayne Hoobler whom we have yet to meet. Or Bunny. Or the bartender. Look, man, I can't remember the names of all of the main characters! A lot of people live in Midland City, Ohio!

I think there was more about Trout's ideas making Dwayne crazy but since that's going to be shown in the story later, maybe I'll save talking about it for then!

Slaugherhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade by Kurt Vonnegut (1969)

Jacket design by Paul Bacon.

I was probably on the downhill side of a manic episode when I re-read this novel over a year ago so I never managed a review of it fresh in my noggin. I toyed with the idea of re-re-reading it but after a few pages, I knew I was just covering old familiar ground while the mortality clock continued to tick faster and faster. So I put it down and decided to just do a shit review of Vonnegut's most famous book. Which maybe that's exactly the right novel of his to do a shit review of! There's so much material out there about it, why would anybody care what I thought about it? From what I've learned about doing reviews on the Internet, many denizens of the world simply want three things out of critical writing about a piece of art: the literal point of it; all the "Easter eggs"¹ in it; and why they should give a fuck about it. I suppose that's why morons like AI and hate my line-by-line breakdowns of Pynchon texts. "Just tell me all the secrets and mathematical formulae so I can file it away as 'information' in my stupid electric fat storage system." Insight and dick jokes apparently mean nothing to them.

Slaughterhouse-Five was the first Vonnegut book I ever read. It's probably the first Vonnegut book a lot of people read if they approach Vonnegut as an author they want to read. I imagine a lot of people began reading Vonnegut because they found one of his "lesser" novels in an aunt or uncle's bookcase where they'd stuck it unread after receiving it from some dodgy '70s book club and was then intrigued enough to give it a read. But I started with Slaughterhouse-Five because it was an intentional move on my part. I was a senior at San Jose State University and had found myself in English 1B (or 102? or whatever the second standard English course is you're supposed to take as a Freshman) due to my weird history of transferring schools and skipping semesters. Somewhere along the way, my high school AP credits for the class had disappeared from my record and the school was all, "Hey, idiot. How did you get this far without taking this mandatory Freshman class? Go back and take it!" So there I was, King Shit Senior in a Freshman English class full of fresh new college students, most of whom did not give a fuck about reading and writing but had been told they must take this class. I was like a fucking Golden God in that classroom! My teacher, Aaron Malchow (who was a Graduate Student teacher. What do you call those? I fucking forget. The Non-Certified Spouse, who taught German at the University of Lincoln as one, could tell me but she's asleep!), fucking loved me. Probably. We were probably about the same age, anyway. I bet he wanted to hang out with me because I was so cool.

It's probably time for a new paragraph. Is that how writing works? Is it that arbitrary? Anyway, I had Cerebus pins on my backpack at the time so when I went to the teacher/student meeting to discuss the big essay project for the class, focusing on one author and their work, Assistant Student Near Professor Malchow suggested I do Dave Sim and Cerebus. It was a great suggestion and probably would have been a lot of fun but I was there to learn, dammit! So I wanted to read something I wasn't familiar with. That was Kurt Vonnegut. He was disappointed because I think he wanted to read smart and funny things about Dave Sim being a huge misogynist (which Dave claims he isn't and forces people to sign a petition saying he isn't if they want to have anything at all to do with him, so, um, checkmate, you jerks!). He did thank me for making my essays funny though. He kind of shit on most of his students when he pointed out they all take it so seriously that they're afraid to put any personality into their writing at all. I can't say I didn't understand that feeling that you needed to be academic and serious in your papers. But when you're a couple months away from graduating from college and you're taking a Baby Course for English Babies? It basically frees you up to write an essay that's six pages of ranting about people on campus carrying around umbrellas in the rain.

My point, which I haven't been supporting but I'll just choose to get to it now, is that I don't really need to review this book. Because if a Vonnegut book has been more written about than this one, it's Breakfast of Champions. I meant to end that statement with "I'll eat my own butthole" or something but now we're past it (and also me threatening to eat my own butthole due to being wrong about something just means I'm probably purposefully being wrong because can you imagine eating your own butthole? I'm not being gross! Obviously I mean directly after a shower!), so I'll add some evidence about Slaughterhouse-Five being the most written about Vonnegut novel: it's his magnum opus. So, yeah, of course. Just check the Wikipedia for Slaughterhouse-Five, clock how long it is, and then go look at the stub of an article for Slapstick or Deadeye Dick. If there's a question about Kurt Vonnegut on Jeopardy, the question is going to be "Who do Conservatives pretend they've read but would actually have had a massive aneurysm and be too dead to make that claim if they'd actually read anything he's ever written?" I mean, "What is Slaughterhouse-Five, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death?"

This book is about the bombing of Dresden and the existential dread that settled over Vonnegut for the rest of his life having survived it. Kurt says this about Dresden on the first page of the novel and I think it might be the sentence that most explains Vonnegut's point of view: "There must be tons of human bone meal in the ground." That's his description of Dresden when he went back to visit in 1967. But isn't that just his description of life and the world humans have made? He's referencing bone meal that wouldn't be there if not for the actions of other human beings. This is how fucked up we are and this is the shit world we live in and it's because of this, because of all this human bone meal we tread upon every day, that he's so insistent that we just fucking be kind to each other.

My attempt at a theme for this novel is this: "Life is hard and it can often suck and the people in power will make it worse and the strangers around you often don't give a shit about you and we're all going to wind up bone meal paving the streets of every big city in the world so maybe don't make this finite existence worse for other people going through the same shit?" And also maybe, "Don't blame yourself for the times you didn't do your best. We're all just fucking trying and, well, free will isn't even a thing, sort of!" I remember somewhere in the beginning of this book, he tells his kids to do anything they want except go into making weapons.² Seems like good, reasonable fucking advice.

I've been to Dresden. Hanging in my living room, I have a framed picture of a barren landscape of dark trees next to the Elbe, just dozens of feet from Dresden Castle, that I took while I was there. I should label it "Human Bone Meal". I was there in 2003 or so. Sixty years after the bombing of Dresden. They were still fucking rebuilding shit.

Another line I think exemplifies Vonnegut's philosophy. This one on page 8, a quote from his father: "You know—you never wrote a story with a villain in it." And here's a phrase that I hate to read when I'm reading people's essays on the Internet, a phrase that I'm now using even though I hate it, using it because it sounds like such a Vonnegutian phrase (although I never hate it when Vonnegut uses it because he knows when to use it for good effect): "Think on that." Vonnegut doesn't write villains because life is the antagonist. Life is trying to kill us all and all we have to help defeat it—at least for as long as we can—is each other. We are villains when we refuse to be kind to others, when we let greed and stupidity and selfish violent actions overcome our empathy and compassion.

Remember: Conservatives could never like Vonnegut.

I believe the closest Vonnegut ever came to writing a villain was when he was writing a nonfiction essay about William F. Buckley, Jr.

I'm almost done with this review and I haven't even mentioned Billy Pilgrim or Tralfamadore or Montana Wildhack. Why should I?

The first chapter of Slaughterhouse-Five is what most people would have called an author's note because it's not even a prologue. Vonnegut explains how the book came to be in Chapter One and the story begins in Chapter Two. You know the novel begins in Chapter Two and not Chapter One because Vonnegut ends Chapter One by saying the novel begins with "Listen. Billy Pilgrim has become unstuck in time" and that's the line that begins Chapter Two. It's odd, isn't it?

The end of this review is this: I have just re-re-re-re-re-read (it's hard to know how many times I've read it over my 55 years) Chapter One of Slaughterhouse-Five and I've cried multiple times while doing so and my heart is broken for all the children coerced into going off to war and making the world a worse place simply because terrible men who have never found anything to love in this world forced them to (or, at the very least, manipulated them through propaganda and the mythology of what it means to be a man). I guess I'm about to read it again?

P.S. There's a lot of horseshit about the book on its Wikipedia page. Don't read that. It'll just confuse you. Read the fucking book, slacker.



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¹ Those quote marks are doing a lot of mental work here. I feel like the Internet meaning of "Easter egg" has changed the pre-Internet meaning so much that it's basically unrecognizable now. There was a time when "Easter egg" truly meant something somewhat outside the work that was hidden, meant to be hard to find, and was simply a surprising, interesting, and cool find when it was. An Easter egg had no impact on the work it was hidden within. Now it just means something recognizable was referenced. "Oh! The protagonist in the opening credits of Movie X mentions truth and beauty in this bit. That's a reference to John Keats' 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'!" There was a time when audiences were expected to know things and knowing those things helped understand the overall theme and plot of a work, or the dialogue happening between generations of poets, or, in visual art, philosophical ideas communicated through the styles used or subverted. Now these are just "Easter eggs" for people to point out as endless bits of Trivia on an IMDB page or that awful TV Tropes shit that's ruined actually experiencing things with your own fucking mind. The purposeful references in a work of art are now just seen as opportunities to post an "I see what u did there" gif instead of a helpful aid in understanding the overall work of art. Internet "Easter Eggs" are noticing that the title Infinite Jest comes from "Hamlet" without understanding that David Foster Wallace is saying, "Get thee to The Complete Works of Shakespeare before reading this book because it'll, you know, fucking help."
² "I have told my sons that they are not under any circumstances to take part in massacres, and that the news of massacres of enemies is not to fill them with satisfaction or glee. I have also told them not to work for companies which make massacre machinery, and to express contempt for people who think we need machinery like that." Page 19, Slaughterhouse-Five. Amen.

Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut (1976)

If you feel like you only have time in your life to read 13 of Vonnegut's 14 novels, just skip this one. Although it's such an easy and quick read, it would probably be weird to tell somebody you didn't have time to read it because your super exciting and sexy life got in the way from completing a read-through of all of Vonnegut's books. I'm just giving my advice in those really marginal cases where somebody absolutely only had time to read 92% of Vonnegut's novels.

Perhaps if you simply don't read every time Vonnegut writes "Hi Ho", you can save enough time to actually read all of Vonnegut's novels anyway! But if you really are up against a mortal time crunch and you can't find any way to fit this book into your finite lifespan, you could just read Vonnegut's Playboy interview in Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons. He gives all the salient points of this book in that interview, even regurgitating a joke his brother told him about scientists and how messy they are.

I love Vonnegut but this book feels like he had an idea that was maybe a bit too grand and he wasn't sure how to express it. Or maybe he did know what he was doing and he was saying, "Look. We should treat each other as family. We should be able to trust each other, encourage each other, be the safety net for each other, without any ridiculous bureaucratic nonsense and simplified ideas like portrayed in this book. But importantly, and maybe the smartest thing I put down in this book, we should be able to bluntly and succinctly tell the people who stopped earning our trust to go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut. Go take a flying fuck at the moon."

Sorry for swearing without a warning but I was only quoting Vonnegut! But Vonnegut's right in that aspect. We need to care more about each other and we also need to easily and simply tell the people who suck that they suck. Just like a family!

Deadeye Dick by Kurt Vonnegut (1982)

I'm sure this first edition cover layout has some inherent meaning to the theme of "epilogueness" and not just some art director being lazy.

This cover has completely thrown me for a loop. I'll have to delay my actual review of this book to review this cover now! The layout has to have some purpose to it, right?! It can't just be, "Fuck it! Just choose a couple of fonts, stick Kurt's name at the top to make it sell, and increase the title by 5000%. Bosh! Killed it!" I suppose the thing that stands out the most is how the cover literally reads, "Kurt Vonnegut Dead" which, I mean, plays into the fucking theme so well that maybe I figured it out? Also two words you can't help to read in this style are "Dead Dick" which, again, play into the fucking theme! Did some art director (or Vonnegut himself?) actually smash this thing out of the park by creating the most bland cover they could think of? Because being bland and boring and unattractive also play into the themes of this book!

Okay, enough about the cover. I wonder if I should discuss the covers more often instead of just dropping the first edition cover at the beginning of the review with an implied "This was the initial idea for selling this book!" and letting everybody come up with their own opinions on why the publisher (or Vonnegut?!) thought it was the best idea at the time. Who ever got anywhere letting other people think for themselves?! I should be telling everybody what these covers mean and why they were chosen!

Oh! I know why I didn't discuss the covers on a bunch of my past reviews! Because I wrote them for Goodreads and Goodreads chooses which cover they want to show. Which is bullshit. Also Goodreads is bullshit because they have some weird "Top 100 Reviewers" thing that tries to gamify the experience but what eventually happens is you just have a Top 100 of the most bland and reviewy reviews a bunch of people can squeeze out of their word frosting piping bags. That's my eloquent way of saying "mouths". Anyway, I write reviews for my blog first and foremost now! If I can bother, I'll eventually move them to Goodreads instead of the other way around.

What was I doing? Oh yeah! A review for Deadeye Dick!

Kurt Vonnegut was 60 when this book was published and he was 13 years past the publication of the book that was the final version of what he'd been trying to say in all the books previous (I'm talking about Slaughterhouse-Five, in case you're more ignorant than I am). In that sense, Kurt probably thought of all of his books after that as epilogue. He still had things to say, and he said them well (sometimes! I mean, did he need to write Slapstick? Or could it have simply existed as the expressed idea of a book in his Playboy interview? (On a side-note, I just realized there's a movie version of Slapstick starring Jerry Lewis, Madeline Kahn, and Marty Feldman. And it's on Tubi! I know what I'm doing after work tomorrow morning!)), but I don't think he had the same driving need to express them after releasing the Dresden bombing demons in Slaughterhouse. My main evidence of this is entirely personal in that I like Vonnegut's work much better pre-Breakfast of Champions (inclusive) than post that novel. This, of course, ignores Galapagos which I don't own but I began to re-read two years ago when a friend of mine was throwing her "20 Year Anniversary of her 30th Birthday Party" at a sex castle on the coast of Washington state. I don't think she completely realized it was a sex castle; she just wanted to throw a huge party in a castle. But when I was downstairs in the sex dungeon dropping my bags off in one of the rooms that oddly had windows from the hall looking in on the bedrooms and a hot tub surrounded by walls with actual weapons on them, I noticed the engraving on the shower door of a woman straddling a knight and I was all, "Oh. I get it." Then I went upstairs and was all, "Nice sex dungeon, Xan!" And she was all, "Oh yeah! I see it now!" My point being that the sex castle had a bunch of books on their shelves and one was Galapagos and I began re-reading it one night when I couldn't sleep and I forgot how great it was and he invented the Apple iPod and/or iPhone in it.

How can one person lose their train of thought this often? Trains are supposed to run on tracks so they easily get to their destination! Why does my thought train think it can go any-fucking-where it wants?!

The point of the point is that for nearly a decade, I've been trying to describe in my comic book reviews how exactly it feels to be living the last half of your life, when all the potential of your life has long ago gone been expended in the kinetic days of your youth. One of my own favorite quotes (if you'll excuse an old man for being intellectually masturbatory) is, "Young people are just old people who have yet to realize they've wasted their lives." Little did I know (or remember since I did read this book in my 20s), Kurt Vonnegut already expressed that feeling in Deadeye Dick. The main question in the book is this: "What do you do with the rest of your life after your story has already been told?" Technically, Vonnegut answers that question by writing this book. But, you know, that's just a glib answer that ignores everything else in the book!

Back to the cover! See how "Kurt Vonnegut Dead" expresses the idea of living out your epilogue after your story is already over? There's really nothing left but to maybe express how you felt the story went. And in Deadeye Dick, the story doesn't go great. Kurt obliterates all the characters living in his Midland City. His main character lives his entire life without ever intimately connecting with another being (literally growing old as a virgin which again references the cover's "Dead Dick"), basically living an entire life of epilogue after his story ends when he, as a child, accidentally kills a pregnant woman by firing a rifle from the roof of his family home. After taking the life of a woman and all the potential life and stories of the baby within her, he decides he doesn't deserve a life or a story himself. That isn't (again I think of the word "technically") the end of his story completely though. He does try to have a story through the encouragement of a writing teacher. So he writes a play, it's performed one time in New York and once in his home town, and then that's it. Story over. The rest is epilogue, baby.

I suppose I didn't remember much from this novel because when I first read it, my story was still happening. Potential was just jizzing and jizzing and jizzing in my face. How could I understand the utter apathetic uselessness of staring down years and years of life that feel like they don't matter? Except that's not the point! Just like Vonnegut always does, he points out the world is shit and people fucking suck and death looms on the horizon. But he also fires up an engine of hope and kindness and reminds people, "It doesn't have to be this way." In the story, it seems like Rudy Waltz (did I just now mention the main character's name? Fuck I suck at this) is having a terrible life. But he finds things he enjoys and he winds up in a place where he's content. He realizes that he loves the epilogue. He doesn't want a story. He's happy not having a story and not caring about the need for a story. He seems content.

Okay, that review was terrible. I'll admit it. But I do want to point out one striking bit that reminded me of my time in college. I was a literature major who didn't realize he was focusing on gender studies in the things he wrote until years later but who couldn't help writing papers about gender when reading so much 19th Century literature by and about women living in eras which were trying desperately not to notice them (the eras were trying, not the women). Kurt Vonnegut expresses how he realized so many women throughout his life were living epilogues and how unhappy it made so many of them and how he saw so many of them commit suicide because of it. Society told them their story was to get married and have a child. And that was it. What does that do to a person's mind when they've been told, over and over and over, that their story was virtually over before they even hit their mid-20s?! Probably earlier in many cases! Vonnegut acknowledges the weight of that, possibly thinking about his own mother (whose story, like many of Vonnegut's relations, was also hampered by mental illness. So chuck that into the mix of a life story and good luck, baby!), sort of mentions it in passing as he does with so much stuff, and moves on.

One of the things about Vonnegut's novels in his epilogue (and maybe more before that but I seem to notice it more in these later books) is that they're less focused on one major theme and just sort of express a scattershot bunch of ideas. I suppose he does this in Cat's Cradle as well so maybe I'm wrong that it's just his later stuff. It's more probably that I just wasn't old enough to truly grok the themes of Vonnegut's later novels when I was a stupid jerk in his twenties, face so covered in potential's jizz, that I just didn't understand, or want to understand, a fucking word of this thing. I probably read it and was all, "This guy don't fuck?! How can this guy not fuck?! What's wrong with this guy?! Fucking loser, man!"

Anyway. Hi ho, I guess?

God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut (1965)

In this book, Eliot Rosewater suggests that some science fiction writer should write a science fiction book about money which is what Kurt Vonnegut has chosen to do. While Vonnegut, as always, touches upon many themes throughout the book, the overarching theme is about money, inherited wealth, and the wide gap between rich and poor created by capitalism. It's about how wealth is concentrated among so few and how those few often did nothing to accumulate that wealth except happen to be born with the correct surname. Eliot Rosewater happens to be the main protagonist although he is only one of a dozen or more characters who also think they're the main characters (which they are, all equally, no matter how many pages they're allowed, given this is a Kurt Vonnegut novel). Throughout the novel, he is driven crazy by his responsibility to do something good and decent with the money he lucked into until he ultimately finds a quite Biblical, if not Communist (neutrally used!), solution to his problem. Basically, he spreads his seeds (figuratively) and spreads the wealth (literally).

I first read all of Vonnegut's books in my twenties and am re-reading them again now that I've hit my fifties. I loved them then, and they must have informed some of who I became in their kindness and optimism and cynicism and all of what they are, but I see them much more clearly now. I was too selfish to see exactly how they reflected the world back then, to see how clear-eyed Vonnegut was viewing the world. Conservatives will accuse any liberal or progressive view as having a modern agenda and yet Vonnegut was expressing those same views in his earliest novels and stories from the late fifties and throughout the sixties.

Here's a quote from the book I love where Trout is basically Vonnegut's pure sci-fi, pulp alter ego and the "He" in the quote is the manipulative lawyer Mushari trying to get his mitts on a fraction of Eliot's money by declaring Eliot insane although "He" could be any small-minded pundit or conservative today: "He didn't understand that what Trout had in common with pornography wasn't sex but fantasies of an impossibly hospitable world."

This novel has more heart than plot. That's a good thing, at times. Like the television show, Atlanta, it's more a variety of sketches depicting the pot holes scattered (purposefully!) across the American landscape and a few of the people trying to navigate around or through them.

There's maybe too much throughout this novel to write a concise review of it so I'd just like to quote Eliot's speech he was meant to give at a science fiction convention, a speech Mushari chooses to use as evidence that Eliot is insane. Apparently, according to lawyers and senators and anybody that embraces the status quo, giving a damn means you're crazy.

"I love you sons of bitches," Eliot said in Milford. "You're all I read any more. You're the only ones who'll talk about the really terrific changes going on, the only ones crazy enough to know that life is a space voyage, and not a short one, either, but one that'll last for billions of years. You're the only ones with guts enough to really care about the future, who really notice what machines do to us, what wars do to us, what cities do to us, what big, simple ideas do to us, what tremendous misunderstandings, mistakes, accidents and catastrophes do to us. You're the only ones zany enough to agonize over time and distances without limit, over mysteries that will never die, over the fact that we are right now determining whether the space voyage for the next billion years or so is going to be Heaven or Hell."

Cat's Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut (1963)

Sometimes I'll watch a television show like Star Trek: The Next Generation and think, "I wonder how many conservatives think they enjoy this show?" And sometimes I'll read a book and think, "I wonder how many conservatives think they love this book and the author in general?" I often wonder how many conservatives think they love Kurt Vonnegut specifically but that just makes me think, "They must never have read a Kurt Vonnegut novel. They just know they're supposed to appreciate his work." It's like how the best way to disbelieve The Bible is to actually read The Bible, reading a Kurt Vonnegut book is the best way to know if you're a terrible person or not. Here's a hint as to how you discover you're a terrible person: you don't agree with Kurt Vonnegut's conclusions about humanity.

I never actually wondered if any conservatives loved this book in particular because the main messages of this book, clearly stated, are "Humans are stupid and vicious," "War is terrible," "God doesn't exist," "Religion sucks," and "Life is inherently meaningless." There's a good reason for Kurt Vonnegut to believe these things and he was always quite open about it: all of his books were attempts to reconcile his surviving the carpet bombing of Dresden. What he has come up with in Cat's Cradle seems pretty succinct if not terribly well plotted or profound (at least not profound for a reader who has already reached all the conclusions Vonnegut reaches. And I'd reached them all by the first time I read this book in my twenties. And those conclusions are just more solidified in my fifties. As if my beliefs have configured themselves in a sort of ice nine molecular pattern, you might say).

Cat's Cradle has 127 chapters across 191 pages. It's an easy read, even for a Kurt Vonnegut book. It feels like Kurt was overwhelmed by things he needed to say and so he blurted them out in short vignettes within a story about the end of the world. He has a lot to say here, most of it via a made-up religion called Bokononism which embraces lies because Bokonon understood that the only meaning life has is what we give it. At one point, Newt, the son of the fictional father of the atom bomb, describes the child's game of cat's cradle, a game he points out humans have been playing for ages, teaching it to their confused kids one generation after the other. The game uses a piece of thread to create random connections, various patterns of X's. He shows the game to the narrator and says, "No damn cat, and no damn cradle." Meaninglessness abstracted into a child's game to teach children the true nature of life.

One of the greatest aspects of Vonnegut's writing is that while he may be incredibly cynical, he is never hopeless. Sure, this book ends with the end of the world and Bokonon suggesting the actual ending should be suicide while taunting God. But ultimately, Vonnegut expresses his desire for humans to be kinder, to be better. Cynically, he points out that history has proven that man will never turn away from being as violent and stupid as possible, even with (especially with?) the violent and stupid examples of how humans have acted throughout history. But he wants them to be better. He wants them to be kinder. He wants them to move past the need for meaning and find that all we have are each other and, maybe, we should stop, maybe, buying into the foma of leaders and killing each other for granfalloon reasons. When power and money become our wampeters, we are destined to ice nine our home and everybody in it.

Chapter 114 is a particularly Vonnegutian chapter and probably my favorite. The American ambassador to San Lorenzo goes off speech at a day of celebration to earnestly discuss his thoughts on war and it's absolutely heartbreaking. It feels like the heart of the book even if it doesn't really fit with the plot up to that point or beyond. But that's because it comes from that main reason Kurt was writing. It has one night in Dresden seeping from between each word. And I can't imagine anybody reading it and thinking, "I love this and I'm a conservative."

Mother Night by Kurt Vonnegut (1962)

When I first read Vonnegut's Mother Night in my twenties, I hadn't the background or experience to perceive the scope of it. I hadn't lived through anything that had prepared my mind for what Vonnegut was attempting to express. It left no great impression on my mind and I couldn't have even speculated as to the plot before picking it up again. But now that I have, and I have finished, I am aghast at how relevant this book about a Nazi propagandist is (a Nazi propagandist who claims to be a spy throughout the book, and even seems to be exonerated, but I sense too much of Pale Fire's Charles Kinbote in him. I suppose I can take him at his word, and believe the final letter he receives, although, in the end, it hardly matters. "We are who we pretend to be").

I first read this book before Fox News completely lost its mind and became not just a Republican State Media channel but an Anti-Democrat Hate Machine. The channel has no other goal than to erode the humanity of liberals and fill their audience with hatred and mistrust. Nobody could read this novel today without making the connection between Howard J. Campbell, the book's "Nazi propagandist" narrator, and most of the hosts of Fox News shows.

At one point in the novel, Howard J. Campbell writes, on meeting Adolf Eichmann in an Israeli prison while both are waiting to go on trial:

"As a friend of the court that will try Eichmann, I offer my opinion that Eichmann cannot distinguish between right and wrong—that not only right and wrong, but truth and falsehood, hope and despair, beauty and ugliness, kindness and cruelty, comedy and tragedy, are all processed by Eichmann's mind indiscriminately, like birdshot through a bugle.
     My case is different. I always know when I tell a lie, am capable of imagining the cruel consequences of anybody's believing my lies, know cruelty is wrong. I could no more lie without noticing it than I could unknowingly pass a kidney stone.
     If there is another life after this one, I would like very much, in the next one, to be the sort of person of whom it could truly be said, 'Forgive him—he knows not what he does.' This cannot be said of me now."

And thus we have to see the propagandist in one of these two ways. Do they know the harm they are spreading through their lies and deceit? Or do they believe the things they say, seeing themselves as some kind of hero . . . maybe not even believing the lies spread but believing so passionately in the result of those lies through the actions of the people who will believe them.

And which winds up being worse? They are both terrible but there's something truly cruel and inhuman about knowing you are spreading lies and knowing what kind of cruelty and chaos those lies will unleash on the world. If only there were another world after this one in which someone could judge our actions after. What would happen to Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Laura Ingraham? What has happened to Rush Limbaugh and Charlie Kirk?

And Vonnegut doesn't let the people who believe the lies off the hook by simply concentrating on Howard J. Campbell. In the editor's note by Vonnegut in the beginning of the book, he discusses what the dedication should have been.

"I would prefer to dedicate it to one familiar person, male or female, widely known to have done evil while saying to himself, 'A very good me, the real me, a me made in heaven, is hidden deep inside.'"

How many Americans are currently that person? Doing real evil, making the world a worse place for so many others, while patting themselves on the back for being such a good neighbor, or good mother, or a good brother, acting so civilly and with such kindness to the people they know? How could they be a terrible person when they know so well how good they actually are?

The people who might recognize themselves in this book won't read it. And if they did, they wouldn't recognize themselves anyway. Because this book is about the type of people who are unable to engage in self-reflection.

The Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut (1959)

I've long had it in my head that Vonnegut's The Sirens of Titan was an anomaly, that it wasn't much of a "Vonnegut book." Upon re-reading it, I think I understand why. Not that it isn't as much a Vonnegut book as some of his others; it may even be more so if one considers all of Vonnegut's books were him trying to make sense of what happened to him in Dresden in World War II as a prisoner of war. It does this to a further extent than I would have expected. No, what made me think of this book differently is that it's much more a pulp sci-fi novel than some of his other sci-fi novels. If Breakfast of Champions is a Vonnegut book, The Sirens of Titan is a Kilgore Trout novel.

When reading Player Piano, I couldn't help thinking of how much it felt like a version of Mike Judge's Office Space for the 50s. This book reminded me, in quite a few major aspects, of Alan Moore's Watchmen and Douglas Adam's Mostly Harmless. One of the main characters in this book, Winston Niles Rumfoord, is a man who, through an accident, has been removed from linear time. He might not be as powerful as Dr. Manhattan, but he has the same perspective. But he's also Ozymandias in that he lives in isolation keeping tabs on everything that's happening (and has happened and will happened because remember he's also Dr. Manhattan) with his large pet Kazak (a dog rather than some exotic cat-thing). Niles also creates a plan for an invasion of Earth which will unite all humans and create a new era of peace. That's the main plot. It's Watchmen before Watchmen (not to be confused with Before Watchmen of which I'm sorry I just now reminded some of you).

The part that reminds me of Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless is kind of the plot beneath the plot. Maybe it's sort of the theme, part of Vonnegut's working through why he survived the carpet bombing in Dresden. It's a part of the story that's only really hinted at until the final chapter and concerns an alien race from Tralfamadore (See? Kilgore Trout!). Like the new model Hitchhiker's Guide in Mostly Harmless, the Tralfamadorians can manipulate space/time so that a thing they want to happen eventually happens when it needs to happen. The entire human civilization of Earth effectively exists to deliver a part for one of their own's broken down spaceship on Titan. Everything that ever happened to Earth and the Earthlings on it was manipulated to get that part delivered. It's the same idea as everything that happens in Mostly Harmless was a manipulation by the New and Improved Hitchhiker's Guide model to make sure Earth was destroyed.

This is Vonnegut's second book and the ideas within it are as good as any Vonnegut has put forth. Maybe the writing is a little rough here but then that's probably why he came up with the idea of Kilgore Trout. He probably saw the differences in this book, and Player Piano, and what his style of writing would become. But at the heart of this book (and Player Piano) is a writer who somehow balances cynicism and earnestness to a seemingly impossible degree. You can truly feel his pain as he systematically deconstructs society's terrible beliefs, traditions, and accepted social mores which caused, and continue to cause, that pain.

Kurt Vonnegut is a genius and I can't wait to re-read everything else because it just gets better.

Player Piano by Kurt Vonnegut (1952)

When I first met the woman my father-in-law would eventually marry, she asked me what my top five favorite books were. It really wasn't until that moment, after examining the answers I gave that day (the list always changes. If you ever want to make sure I'm eventually locked out of an Internet account, make sure the security question asks what my favorite book is. Because I'll never remember the answer I gave at the time I first answered it), I realized all of my favorite books had protagonists battling against an unjust society and, when they eventually realize they can't actually win, simply escape. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Catch-22. The Grapes of Wrath. House of Leaves. Okay, maybe not House of Leaves. But maybe House of Leaves! Just prove that it isn't! I mean, where is Navidson going anyway and is Johnny even alive?! Or was it a brother who died in birth driving Pelafina mad?!

You know what? This isn't a House of Leaves review. This is about Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano! A book which fits the description of my other favorite books except that the main character doesn't escape at the end. So it's a bit more depressing. Also a cat dies in the first chapter which is why this book loses a star. Sorry, Vonnegut, but you know the rules. Oh wait. You don't? Well the only rule is that if an animal is killed in a book or a movie, it automatically gets downgraded in my ranking. Unless the point of the book is that we're all supposed to kill our own dogs and murder our best and only friend. Then I guess I can see the point. Who wouldn't want to learn that lesson when reading a book?!

I first read this book in my twenties and now I'm in my forties and oh boy is it a different experience. In my twenties, I probably took the whole "revolution against the status quo" for granted and then was annoyed that the powers that be won in the end. But this time, every chapter was a revelation after which I had to check, over and over, how old Vonnegut was when this book was published so I could look up from my book and say, out loud, "How was he so perceptive?!"

The only modern problem with this book is that, if you wanted to ignore the philosophical and ethical underpinnings of the story, and pretend to misread the themes and character motivations, it could be read as the story of Q-Anon leading up to the attempted American coup. I only mention this because the kind of people who would believe Q-Anon nonsense would also approach this book in the disingenuous manner which I laid out at the beginning of this paragraph.

But if you read the book correctly (Oh, do not argue that point. We all know there are correct and incorrect ways to read every book. People who think any way to read a book is "a correct way" are just lazy and narcissistic readers), you'll know this is as effective, touching, and damning of the status quo as anything written by Douglas Coupland or Joseph Heller or Kurt Vonnegut. Oh wait, it was written by Kurt Vonnegut. Well, that explains that then!

Damnit, Vonnegut. I'm still thinking about that poor cat.