Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Breakfast of Champions, serves as a demonstration of satire. It is a story of events leading to an encounter between Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout. It vividly describes this meeting, the surroundings, their views on different issues and the events following it. Kurt Vonnegut has used satire as a means to show how individuals participate actively in America’s conflict. He combines humor, blunt expressions and ridicule to portray how people take part in causing America’s conflict. He uses this book as a mirror to reflect the problems that happen in the world today and explain how they are caused.
Kurt Vonnegut displays how American people were trying their best to imitate the life of people in fictional books. He further demonstrates how the Pyramid truck drivers’ job required the construction of roads and thus caused pollution. These would lead to destruction of the environment and consequently to the death of humanity. This means that people destroy themselves when they destroy the planet. The author shows that the novel’s narrator is unable to control the machines. He struggles to light the dome light, yet this is his created world. This demonstrates how people struggle to invent technique to ease their lives yet they are unable to operate them, and it ends up in creating problems for them. From the novel, “There was nothing sacred about me or about any human being that we are all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide.” (Vonnegut 171).
He further states how the world conquerors used guns to destroy the wiring of a difficult machine from far away. Pollution and destruction of the earth are portrayed as having been caused by the manufacturing processes of large lousy machines. The stream that passes through the Sacred Miracle Cave produces bubbles that smell like athlete’s foot as portrayed by the author. This is linked to being the cause of the disease in Bermuda. The territory of West Virginia is also shown as the one that was destroyed by machinery and explosive materials which the people used for mining coal. It was now collapsing into the holes that had been dug. This demolition is explained as having occurred with government authorization, which gets its power from people. This shows that everyone is to be blamed for the destruction and the existing conflict in America and the world at large.
People were relying too much on ideas. When Trout notices how much his idea had frenzied Hoover, he proclaims: “Ideas or the lack of them can cause a disease” (Vonnegut 11). This meant that the idea of developing machinery leads to their destruction. Ideas leak throughout the society like an ailment. This is shown when Trout tells the Pyramid truck driver that mirrors are referred to as leaks in Bermuda. The driver relays this to his wife who in turn tells her allies. This meant that an idea whether bad or good spread throughout a society making every member a participant in any conflict that may arise from the idea. Trout finds it funny to pretend that mirrors were like holes between two worlds, thus he referred to them as leaks.
People preferred remaining in problems and hardships rather than fleeing. This is because they are afraid that things may be harder away from their current problems. That people become adapted to their environment just ”as an animal would” (Vonnegut 150). He compares this to Trout’s Bill who was afraid of everything outside the window. Bill has been in a cage his whole life and when he is freed he does not know what to do and even misses the cage. This makes individuals to be active participants in the conflict of American culture. They are afraid of solving problems existing in the culture and they adapt and view these problems as a normal way of life instead.
Ownership of almost all land divided between a few majorities, such as Dwayne Hoover, demonstrates how selfish people were causing problems to the others, like freed black slaves, who did not have any piece of land. Trout’s story demonstrates these issues. All the plots in Hawaiian Islands belong to approximately forty people. These land owners do not welcome trespassers to their land. This arouses the need of the people living there to find an alternative way in order not to trespass. This made them dangle from strings of the helium. This is an extreme exaggeration. It is used by Kurt Vonnegut to fill the story with humor as well as show how individuals participate in American conflict. Nelson Rockefeller, the Governor of New York, has also been used to show how the ownership rules made by individuals led to the conflict among the same individuals.
Rockefeller owned large parts of land reach with the minerals and the petroleum. However, there was a rule that one only owned what was on the land but not what was underneath it or buried deep in the bowels of the earth. An old miner tells Trout that it was wrong for the one to destroy what was on the land in order to get what was hidden underneath it. Those who owned big parts of land did not find it was worth sharing its reaches with those who did not have anything. Vietnam is described as a communist state while America was shown “dropping things from airplanes” (Vonnegut 74) to bring communism to a halt. There was a factory where the brother to the truck driver worked that manufactured chemicals to destroy the plants and greenery in the country. This means that he and all the other workers were participating in destruction of the planet. Therefore, people are active participants in the world problems.
The urge of people to progress led to many having become too much involved in trade and developing new technologies. This, therefore, resulted in the use of advertisements and the evolving of machines that could perform various tasks at a greater speed than the humans could do. This is shown when the narrator goes after Kilgore Trout, who came to a halt to read a motto; “Progress is our most important product” (Vonnegut 74). Such advertisements are shown “like lullabies to Dwayne” (Vonnegut 106-108). This proves that Dwayne was more concerned with marketing goods for buying and selling of those things than caring about the environment. The author explains how people sold most of their goods some due to those promising advertisements.
Though the people lost all the goods, more children were still being born. This led to overpopulation, the next global issue, as explained by Kurt Vonnegut. They also paid too much attention to the people’s race. For instance, Dwayne Hoover’s step parents had originally been called Hoobler, but they later changed it after realizing that it was a “nigger name” (Vonnegut 107). Black people are compared to animals on the example of the characters from the novel. However, the author opposes this by displaying all the people, regardless of race, as machines. He explains that all of us have some unwavering light (Vonnegut 175) that differentiates us from machines. All individuals are meat machines (Vonnegut 175) with something sacred at the core, while the others are made from metal or plastic. Despite this similarity, all the individuals contribute to the destruction of the world.
Kurt Vonnegut satirizes many aspects of American society like land ownership, technology, overpopulation, pollution and diseases, among others. He compares these aspects with the others to illustrate his arguments. Humor and blunt language are also used to show the relationship between the individuals and the state of the planet. He displays a reflection of the world, where every individual has actively contributed to the existence of conflict in the American culture and the state of the environment.
Works Cited
Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. Maleny: Rosetta Books, 2010. Print.