BOOK REPORT: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS BY KURT VONNEGUT

Just a short note on Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut. I found reading it to be exhausting, but in the end very rewarding. Characters, dialogue, histories and situations flowed like a torrent from Vonnegut’s rapid-fire pen, and at times I felt I was drowning in all the details and anecdotes, asides and observations etched with his rich, acerbic and sardonic humour.  One section in particular was notable for its thoughtfulness. In what he calls the “spiritual climax” (224) of his novel, Vonnegut—speaking directly to the reader and writing himself into the story—sits in the cocktail lounge at Midland City’s Holiday Inn (where the last third of the novel is mostly set). He describes how the artist, Rabo Karabekian, in explaining the meaning of his abstract painting—purchased at public expense by the city council of Midland City and about which its citizens could make neither hide nor hair of—has “rescued” (225) him. “I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me. I had created him, and he was in my opinion a vain and weak and trashy man, no artist at all. But it is Rabo Karabekian who made me the serene Earthling which I am this day.” (ibid)  

Previously, Vonnegut states he had been “enraged and mystified” by the irrationality and ill-behaviour of his fellow humans. He suggests, with his usual, brilliant satire, that they behaved much like characters in novels. Americans shot each other, he says, because it was “a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.” Or governments treated their citizens like they were “as disposable as paper facial tissues” because “that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up stories.” He resolves therefore to “shun storytelling” and “write about real life”, to give equal weight to every character and all facts within his stories. He would, he says, “bring chaos to order”, instead of the other way around, like is traditionally done in most fictional writing,  which shapes plot and characters to suit some preordained outcome.

Before he has Karabekian address his critics in the Holiday Inn lounge, Vonnegut, as both author and character (and drinking a “Black and White with water”), says to the reader that he had,

“…come to the conclusion that there is nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we were all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide…I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. I did not expect Rabo Karabekian to rescue me.” (ibid)

      What Karabekian says is this:

      “I now give you my word of honor,” he went on, “that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal. It is the immaterial core of every animal—the ‘I am” to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.  

     “I have just heard from this cocktail waitress here, this vertical band of light, a story about her husband and an idiot who was about to be executed at Shepherdstown [A nearby federal prison]. Very well—let a five-year-old strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.” (226-7)

"The Temptation of Saint Anthony by Rabo Karabekian" *

Vonnegut’s  earlier vision of his fellow humans as soulless, mindless machines has been replaced with one envisioning all living creatures, at their cores, as being luminous bands of light, all of equal weight and importance in an ever-evolving universe.  And that’s quite the pep-talk coming from a made up character in a novel! Finally, the question of what we do with all the messy layers that life tends to deposit atop the luminous bands of our lives is one that Breakfast of Champions attempts to answer, and is a question that is asked, in one form or another, throughout Vonnegut's novels.

Cheers, Jake.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast of Champions. Delacorte Press, 1973. Random House. NY, NY, 2006.


*Just as a point of interest, Saint Anthony (b. circa 251 AD) was an Egyptian monk who is known as the father of Christian monasticism. He is said to have been supernaturally tempted while in his hermitage there, and throughout the centuries there have been numerous artists who have depicted his struggles--notably Michelangelo, Hieronymus Bosch and in modern times Max Ernst and Salavador Dali. This version by Bosch I like the best because of the tranquility of the setting, suggesting that Saint Anthony has 'tamed' many of the demons tempting him. In Ernst and Dali's versions--not so much.
p.s. The version by 'Rabo Karbekian' is not a 'real painting', I don't see any artist asscociated with it. So perhaps it was an illustration for another edition to Vonnegut's book? I think we get the minimalist idea, though the painting itself sucks! 
[Thanks to the font of all knowledge, Wikipedia, for the info and snaps. What will we do without thee, when ye finally wend thy way?]

by Bosch (c. 1500)

by Ernst (1945)

by Dali (1946)