Breakfast of Champions Satirizes Many Aspects of American Ideology

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1973 novel Breakfast of Champions satirizes many aspects of American ideology. This satire emerges when one identifies the patterns of thought (assumptions) that distinguish individuals as active participates in the convoluted conflicts of American culture. Moreover, these crises are indicative of what Vonnegut sees as the flaws in American life. Based on these basic elements of national assumptions, it seems that Breakfast of Champions is satirizing the American culture in regards to race, class, gender, jingoism, history, and environmentalism. These targets can be made clear when one considers the implications of how damaging they are to the nation’s people. Vonnegut’s satire seems centralized and is not a coincidence; it is his impoliteness, anger, and criticism which ultimately imply to the American culture that its citizens need to recognize their flaws, chaos, and bad thinking in order to make a turn in society for the better.

To begin with, color is the most innocent judgment that people used to indentify everything; especially, the U.S. is filled with ethnic culture diversity. According to Vonnegut, the problem that he satirizes through racism is to show how human interpretation is dependent upon visible matter, character, and color rather than trying to understand how meaningful they are. For instance, it explains that in this country color means everything. “The sea pirates were white. The people who were already on the continent, who were already living full and imaginative lives, were copper-colored. When slavery was introduced onto the continent, the slaves were black” (11). Such ideas have been taught for a long time, and people are still subject to judgment by color or the external. Vonnegut was impolite because lack of perception is inherent due to the fact that people brought many colors to the country as possible to insure that the Americans were the only race in the nation in order to have racial classification....