Breakfast Of Champions
(Kurt Vonnegut Jr.)
The basic tenets of postmodernist fiction (if such a term can be considered as anything besides oxymoronic) have established the place of the writer as existing somewhere between the position his predecessors took and the reader. Negating the distance between author and reader thus becomes the goal. Of course, Kurt Vonnegut knows that he cannot be as ignorant as his reader; he still retains the omnipotence and omniscience of authorship. He even acknowledges that he is, to the characters that populate his novels, the Creator of the Universe. So why the ambivalent identity between writer and reader? The novel principally concerns Dwayne Hoover, who lives in a some approximation of Middle America and who sells Pontiacs. He is, unbeknownst to himself, about to collide with the most recognizable character in any Vonnegut novel, Kilgore Trout, though he doesn't know it yet. Vonnegut tells the reader what will happen, though, and it is through this elimination of secrecy that Vonnegut invites us, too, to become Creators alongside him. The mundane story line is mostly there to prove to the reader that this is indeed a novel, though Vonnegut spends most of his time deviating to add sordid details that are completely unnecessary, or to expound on some moral injustice that he seems worthy to criticize. As such, the first two thirds of the novel express a preachy, distant author, whose work seems to be a sermon against the very earth his characters tread upon. However, Vonnegut spares us the illusion that he is trying to serve as some sort of moral compass. As the cataclysm of Dwayne's meeting with Kilgore approaches, the author suddenly inserts himself into the narrative itself, revealing himself to be both modestly ashamed of his work and reticent to preach any longer. Here, the postmodern Vonnegut appears and resurrects the novel from its seemingly bleak prospects. He watches, just as the reader does, the episode between the central characters, stopping here and there to remind us that he is still in control, but nevertheless simultaneously a subject of the same rules his characters must follow when in the story. Slowly, the close raveling of two hundred pages worth of exposition and character development seems almost moot, but for the service that it ultimately does in bringing us closer to the author himself. As Vonnegut brings the story to a close, his part in the novel becomes as important as his role in shaping it, to the point at which Kilgore Trout, whom he encounters on the street, becomes his father and Dwayne Hoover's dead wife his mother. This, more than anything, is the author's immersion into his work the way he knows that we are entering it, and as such provides a perfect specimen of postmodernity in action.
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