Breakfast of Champions
First published 1973 · English · 320 pages
- Novels
- Science fiction
- Fantasy
- Satire and humour
In a small American city, a struggling car dealer named Dwayne Hoover is slipping into madness, while an elderly, little-known science fiction writer named Kilgore Trout travels toward an arts festival where the two will meet. Vonnegut narrates in a loose, cartoonish style, with his own drawings and blunt comments on American life, its greed, waste and racism. He also appears as a character in his own story. It is a comic and strange book about free will, mental illness and the odd habits of a country that has forgotten how to be kind.
Quotes
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
What do I myself think of this particular book? I feel lousy about it, but I always feel lousy about my books.
This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast.