Soggy Wheaties That Went Down Wrong

CALL ME KILGORE. Some years ago -- never mind how long precisely -- Kurt Vonnegut created me. My full name is Kilgore Trout and I'm the author of over 100 novels and 2000 short stories; all science fiction, all unheard of. I often had strong intimations that I was merely the creation of another human being; a particularly sadistic fellow who wanted only to write about somebody who suffers all the time. I was never sure of this idea until I met him in his last novel, Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut wrote himself into this book and approached me at its conclusion. This chance (?) meeting was supposed to change my entire future. Or so he thought.

You see, my Creator made a bad mistake. He liberated me. Invoking the names of Tolstoi and Jefferson, who in their own middle-age had freed their slaves, he said: "Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free." At the same time Vonnegut paradoxically decided the rest of my life for me. I was to become a respected thinker, win the Nobel Prize for Medicine, and die a fulfilled individual. I was shocked to learn this, but I wasn't the least bit thankful. Because my whole life, as he wrote it in God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, Slaughterhouse Five and then Breakfast of Champions had been dedicated to failure. Vonnegut even had me proclaim that I was "a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beauty--and didn't find doodley-squat!" An I now to deny this statement, along with my past, just because my Creator had other plans? No. I am free to choose my own course, and I've decided to rededicate myself to failure. I'm not going to continue writing sci-fi trash for porn magazines. Instead, I'll criticize the many other failures in the literary world.

In my search for a liveable theology I've discovered that Breakfast of Champions, the very work liberating me to criticize bad books is, quite frankly, terrible. It's so bad, I can no longer, deny Nietzsche: Kurt Vonnegut, my Creator, has lost his creativity; Got ist, indeed, tot.

The plot is simple enough. I am invited to the Midland City Festival of the Arts through the efforts of Eliot Rosewater, an eccentric millionaire with the handwriting of a fourteen-year-old, and incidentally, my only fan. After a rather roundabout trip I arrive, only to drive a Pontiac dealer, Dwayne Hoover, insane with the ideas from one of my books. You can imagine my horror; I had never even driven a Pontiac before, and besides, my books had always influenced people to do only one thing: cut out the dirty pictures my publishers put in them and then burn the rest.

Breakfast of Champions is loaded with pictures too, all by my creator. Unfortunately Vonnegut can't blame his publishers for these childish sketches, which I assume were included to pad the novel out. In many ways, these drawings, along with the over-simplified prose indigenous to the Vonnegut novels I've lived in, remind me of The Little Prince, by Antoine de Saint Exupery. This is a heavy classic, the kind of children's book where adults can find "deep awareness." But if The Little Prince has any content, Breakfast of Champions has none. My creator's general idea is to take order and make of it utter chaos. He reasons that we should all "adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos." And I can understand his problem; if your book jumped around in time and space like a kangaroo in heat, you'd want your readers to adapt to chaos too.

THIS STORY HAS more to it than just my unscrewing the last bolt out of some Pontiac dealer's engine. My creator has silly ideas, which, despite their sometimes tenuous connection to the story, he never fails to explore. Many of his ideas are social criticism derived from the absurdities and idiosyncrasies of American experience. In the past, there were funny. I was funny. But when I'm not bored by Breakfast of Champions, it makes me want to cry. I'm just not funny anymore.

Occasionally, Dwayne Hoover is funny. Vonegut created him with bad chemicals in his head and faulty wiring in his nervous system. Dwayne represents the belief that we're all machines with no guarantee, programmed to do whether we happen to be doing, until we go haywire. It's quite amazing he lasted as long as he did. Even before I appear in Midland City, Dwayne Hoover is surrounded by quite a cast of characters. Harry LeSabre, his salesman, is a sometime transvestite who expresses his women's clothes fetish during Hawaiian Week at Dwayne Hoover's Exit Eleven Pontiac Village. Francine Pefko, Dwayne's mistress, thinks she is his mother. Bunny is Dwayne's homosexual son. There are more. These three are easily enough to strip the gears of any normally functioning machine.

But my creator gives me the honor of finally driving Dwayne over the brink. Now that I'm free, I want to deny that I ever existed in this novel; I was the unwilling dupe in a mad production. Vonnegut won't get off by claiming he's clearing his head "of all the junk in there." He can't expect me, his own creation, to sympathize with him when he tells his schizophrenic self in a bar in his own novel that he's writing a "very bad book."

When I'm wishing I were back in his novels, undisturbed by the knowledge that I'm a fictitious character who could be leading a less miserable life, I sometimes wonder about Kurt Vonnegut's Creator. What could possibly have motivated Him to have Vonnegut write Breakfast of Champions? What foul soul, mortal or immortal, would allow me to be so maliciously maligned? A thought just struck me. Perhaps my Creator has won his own freedom; maybe he has a free will. Then maybe someday he will come up with something better than this nauseating novel.