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Major and Minor Characters in Breakfast of Champions

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It’s really interesting what Vonnegut does with all of his characters in Breakfast of Champions. Everyone in his novel gets their own “time in the limelight,” and gets to share parts of their backstory and perspective. This goes back to the ideas that Vonnegut expressed in his interview: he wanted his novel to be like a mythological story, and he wanted to abolish the distinction between major and minor characters. We are able to connect a little bit more with all of his characters because of the tidbits of personality we learn about them and, as a result, everyone becomes a major character. Or perhaps everybody becomes a minor character? When I read the book, I couldn’t really empathize much with any of the characters, including Kilgore and Dwayne, who the story revolved around the most. Even the omniscient and omnipotent narrator of the story didn’t have as much control over the path the novel was going down as I expected him to have. In a humorous ending to the book, the narrator was going to prove himself as Kilgore Trout’s maker and reveal all to him but was suddenly attacked Kazak the dog, who he claimed was originally the “main character” of the story. Although he eventually showed Trout his powers, it seems unusual that even the writer could not have anticipated everything that happened in the story. Just like in Trout’s story, it appears as though most of the characters in the novel are just machines that lack free will, and are unable to do anything outside of their programming. In the end, Vonnegut is calling into question whether or not we truly have free will through the carefully defined yet somewhat equal-in-power roles he has assigned to all the character machines in his novel.

-Sofia Yi

Reflection

A Schizophrenic Society

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While madness, unpredictability, and chaos pervade the entirety of Breakfast of Champions, schizophrenia plays a unique role in explaining both the psyche of the narrator and the meaning of the novel as it relates to society as a whole. Schizophrenia is a spectrum mental disorder whose many symptoms include delusions, hallucinations, and fragmentation of thought; the nature of schizophrenia is so little understood that some define it as an umbrella term under which many different diseases exist.

In Vonnegut’s novel, the narrator fears that he may have inherited his mother’s schizophrenia. He demonstrates tremendous anxiety and arguably delusive behavior by inserting himself directly into the narrative, exploring the boundaries of authorial control by interacting directly with his own creations. He functions as an omnipotent creator in a fictional universe, finding salvation from pessimism when one of his characters declares that human beings are defined by their awareness, the quality which gives meaning to life and separates man from machine. This breakthrough allows the narrator to experience spiritual growth, but the act of confronting reality through a series of distorting lenses such as fantasy, irony, and satire is inherently schizophrenic. Our pursuit of truth in art is endlessly fragmented, a reflection of the endless mental fragmentation of society in an increasingly interconnected and vocal world.

If the human world were a single brain, what would control the pattern and flow of thought? An ideal world, like an ideal mind, might have a single dominant personality and one cohesive pattern of thought, but reality is far more complex. As seen in Breakfast of Champions, real society is an endless array of individuals whose lives carry equal weight, with no clear distinctions between major and minor characters. In this way, the most honest definition of reality is a culmination of billions of competing, equally important personal narratives. This chaotic, fractured, endlessly splitting notion of reality can be seen as an extension of the ‘split mind’ concept for which schizophrenia was named, as it applies not only to the condition of a single mind but also to the condition of humanity as a whole.

-Cara