Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

1973 • 322 pages

Ratings253

Average rating3.9

15

Transported into a unique, sharp, empathetic mind, but one I can't quite connect to.
Does the passage of fifty years since publication make that inevitable?
I think it's inevitable I'll eventually try his other greatest hits, as I've stumbled through a couple of his less touted works already.
I appreciate the punchy story-telling style, the arrows denoting paragraphs and the breaks with sketches.
He's obviously not just conscious but fluent in the social issues of his day, which depressingly seem to match up closely to the social issues of the present day:  mental health, contentions around pornography/erotica, drag queens; the prevalence of self-involvement, private and corporate greed, capitalism, private property and land ownership v. stewardship, industrial pollution and environmental destruction, racism, misogyny, SA, military mindset, toxic masculinity, war, animal slaughter for food, ETC. (See what I did there?)
I understand that to challenge the status
 quo is often as much about saying outrageous or vulgar things in a commonplace manner as it is describing all the ills society seems content to ignore in the same manner, to ensure you have the reader's attention, but as clearly laid out as Vonnegut's aims seem to be, in the intervening years since publication it's become well worn territory expressed in a multitude of ways, to the extent that harping on about women's vulvas in print, men's penis sizes in all of their irrelevance to their identities, just kind of makes me tired.
 ⚠️ (In addition to the above) Fatphobia, Suicide, out of date/offensive terms, homophobia 

March 30, 2023