Resumo de Breakfast Of Champions

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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