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# 2021-03-21 - Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
I received this book as a gift.
The introduction was charmingly gonzo, and like the rest of the book,
it stops just shy of going overboard. The author was critical of
popular culture and patriotic narratives. The book contains gallows
humor and comes across as a little cynical. Another reviewer wrote
something i can identify with:
"My Achilles heel as a reader of modern fiction is that I don't cope
well with unconventional narrative styles. Streams of consciousness,
omitted quotation marks, massive infodumps, pages of philosophical
ramblings, etc. I cannot cope with such artistry, and I usually give
up by page 50 or so."
Breakfast of Champions lies within my level of tolerance for
unconventional narrative styles and i was able to finish the book.
Another review says that the author was explaining contemporary
1960's America, and that he was processing his experiences with his
schizophrenic son. It's no wonder that he writes with pessimism.
What follows are salient quotes from the book.
-----
I think I am trying to make my head as empty as it was when I was
born onto this damaged planet fifty years ago.
The things other people have put into MY head, at any rate, do not
fit together nicely, are often useless and ugly, are out of
proportion with one another, are out of proportion with life as it
really is outside my head.
I don't want to throw away any sacred things. What else is sacred?
Oh, Romeo and Juliet, for instance. And all music is.
# Chapter 1
Actually, the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of
the new government [in the United States] owned human slaves. They
used human beings for machinery, and, even after slavery was
eliminated, because it was so embarrassing, they and their
descendants continued to think of ordinary human beings as machines.
Here is how the pirates were able to take whatever they wanted from
anybody else: they had the best boats in the world, they were meaner
than everybody else, and they had gunpowder... The chief weapon of
the sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody
else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and
greedy they were.
# Chapter 3
His high school was named after a slave owner [Thomas Jefferson] who
was also one of the world's greatest theoreticians on the subject of
human liberty.
# Chapter 7
What is the purpose of life?" [Graffiti in a bathroom of an adult
theater.] ... here is what he would have written, if he had anything
to write with: To be the eyes and ears and conscience of the Creator
of the Universe, you fool.
# Chapter 8
People took such awful chances with chemicals [hard drugs] and their
bodies because they wanted the quality of their lives to improve.
They lived in ugly places where there were only ugly things to do.
They didn't own doodley-squat, so they couldn't improve their
surroundings. So they did their best to make their insides beautiful
instead. The results had been catastrophic so far...
# Chapter 15
She was a brand-new adult who was working in order to pay off the
tremendous doctors' and hospital bills her father had run up in the
process of dying of cancer of the colon and then cancer of the
everything.
This was in a country where everybody was expected to pay his own
bills for everything, and one of the most expensive things a person
could do was get sick.
Patty Keene was stupid on purpose, which was the case with most women
in Midland City. The women all had big minds because they were big
animals, but they did not use them much for this reason: unusual
ideas could make enemies, and the women, if they were going to
achieve any sort of comfort and safety, needed all the friends they
could get.
So, in the interests of survival, they trained themselves to be
agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.
# Chapter 17
Every American town of any size had a neighborhood with the same
nickname: Skid Row. It was a place where people who didn't have any
friends or relatives or property or usefulness or ambition were
supposed to go. People like that would be treated with disgust in
other neighborhoods, and policemen would keep them moving.
The basic scheme was this one: they were to stay here [in skid row]
and not bother anybody anywhere else--until they were murdered for
thrills, or until they were frozen to death by the wintertime.
# Chapter 18
I did not know for certain that i have [schizophrenia]. This much I
knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not
narrowing my attention to details of life which were immediately
important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbors believed. I
am better now. Word of honor: I am better now.
# Chapter 19
Terrific forces were at work on our souls, but they could do no work,
because they balanced [out] one another so nicely.
But then a grain of sand crumbled. One force had a sudden advantage
over another, and spiritual continents began to shrug and heave.
Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us.
Everything else about us is dead machinery.
# Chapter 20
E=Mc^2
It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should
have been an "A" in there somewhere for Awareness--without which the
"E" and the "M" and the "c," which was a mathematical constant; could
not exist.
# Chapter 23
Bunny [, who] saw the trouble coming, supposed it was death. He
might have protected himself easily with all the techniques of
fighting he had learned in military school. But he chose to meditate
instead. He closed his eyes, and his awareness sunk into the silence
of the unused lobes of his mind.
# Chapter 24
Eddie Key's familiarity with a teeming past made life much more
interesting to him than it was to Dwayne, for instance, or to me, or
to Kilgore Trout, or to almost any white person in Midland City that
day. We had no sense of anybody else using our eyes--or our hands.
We didn't even know who our great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers
were. Eddie Key was afloat in a river of people who were flowing
from here to there in time. Dwayne and Trout and I were pebbles at
rest.
author: Vonnegut, Kurt
(TXT) detail: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Breakfast_of_Champions
LOC: PZ4.V948 Br PS3572.O5
tags: book,fiction,slapstick
title: Breakfast of Champions
# Tags
(DIR) book
(DIR) fiction
(DIR) slapstick