Greed, Robots and Destruction: the Political Criticisms in Breakfast of Champions

Greed, robots and destruction: the political criticisms in Breakfast of Champions

The novel Breakfast for Champions by Kurt Vonnegut is "tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast. [One of the men] Kilgore Trout is the undiscovered science-fiction writer who has kept popping up in Mr. Vonnegut's previous works--hitchhiking across America to a Festival of the Arts in Midland City”(NY Times). Kurt Vonnegut uses satire in order to criticise the current state of the planet. The novel exclaims how the current destruction of the environment, the emotionless state of the American people and the greed of their Government are inevitably leading to the destruction of the earth. This is represented in such a way that it illustrates to the reader how humans are essentially, passively killing the earth through: the advancement of technology, which is destroying the environment, along with the growing populations, that lack the resources needed to sustain their countries and finally the growing greed and rotten human nature that has led humans to become passive and “robot” like.

Vonnegut’s portrayal of society shows the reader how humans are and have become essentially robotic- like, self-destructing and emotionless beings, as exclaimed by a newspaper article, the author portrays a “prefabricated, unfeeling society and on American culture plagued with despair, greed and apathy”(NY Times). Vonnegut begins analyzing the nature of the human race by explaining the history of America and essentially its people in Chapter 1 of his novel, Breakfast of Champions. He starts the novel off with an opinionated and critical explanation of America, “There were one quadrillion nations in the Universe, but the nation Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout belonged to was the only one with a national anthem which was gibberish sprinkled with question marks”( Vonnegut, Kurt, Breakfast of Champions pg17). Vonnegut often uses sarcastic...