Part 1: Chapter-by-Chapter Summaries
Preface & Dedication
Vonnegut opens not with story but with acknowledgment of debt—to Phoebe Hurty, an Indianapolis widow who taught him impoliteness as grace. The preface establishes the book’s moral coordinates: Hurty believed impoliteness could shape paradise when prosperity came. Vonnegut inherits her method but not her faith. He writes in 1973, after prosperity arrived and produced not paradise but what he’ll spend the next 300 pages documenting: a nation of robots programmed by bad chemicals and worse ideas, a country where “nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise.”
The medical disclaimer about syphilitics in Indianapolis serves double duty—it’s autobiography and thesis statement. Those men with corkscrews eating their spinal columns, shuddering at the crossroads of America, unable to make their legs obey: they’re the book’s central image before the book even begins. Human beings as machines whose wiring has been compromised. Vonnegut saw this as a boy. He’s been preparing to write this book his whole life.
Chapter 1: The Setup
The machinery of narrative commences. Two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a dying planet. Kilgore Trout, science fiction writer, invisible, convinced his life is over. Dwayne Hoover, Pontiac dealer, fabulously well-to-do, manufacturing bad chemicals in his brain. The meeting between them will make Trout beloved and Hoover insane.
But before Vonnegut lets us anywhere near that collision, he makes us reckon with the nation these men inhabit. The national anthem is “gibberish sprinkled with question marks.” The flag cannot be dipped to anyone or anything—a law no other nation has, Vonnegut notes with prosecutor’s precision. The motto is in a dead language. The money features occult symbols the president doesn’t understand. “Nonsense was strength.”
Then the genocide: teachers writing 1492 on blackboards, calling it discovery when it was piracy and slaughter. The Statue of Liberty as “ice cream cone on fire”—Vonnegut’s drawings throughout function as estrangement devices, making the familiar hideous through childlike representation. Sea pirates with gunpowder whose chief weapon was “their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was much too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”
The chapter ends with Trout’s premise in Now It Can Be Told: Everyone on earth is a robot except Dwayne Hoover. Only Dwayne has free will. The idea will poison Dwayne’s mind. Trout becomes “a pioneer in the field of mental health” by dying in 1981, his tombstone reading: “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.”
Chapter 2: Dwayne and Trout Alone
Parallel isolation. Dwayne in his dream house in Fairchild Heights with Sparky, the Labrador who can’t wag his tail, can’t signal friendliness, must fight constantly. Dwayne talks only to the dog: “You and me, Spark.” His black servant Lottie Davis descends from slaves, cleans, cooks, leaves. They barely speak.
Trout in his basement in Cohoes, New York, with Bill the parakeet. Where Dwayne babbles about love, Trout sneers about apocalypse. “High time now,” he tells Bill about the atmosphere becoming unbreathable. He calls mirrors “leaks”—holes between universes. The joke becomes respectable. Everyone will call mirrors leaks by the time of his death.
Vonnegut inhabits Trout completely here. Trout works installing aluminum storm windows and screens, has written 117 novels and 2,000 short stories, makes carbon copies of nothing, publishers pay him “doodley-squat.” His work appears in pornography magazines with illustrations having nothing to do with his tales. Plague on Wheels promised “WIDE OPEN BEAVERS INSIDE!”
The chapter establishes what will become the book’s obsessive accounting: Trout receives one fan letter in his life (from Elliot Rosewater, cost $18,000 to locate him), gets invited to Midland City arts festival for $1,000. He owns a tuxedo from 1924. The tuxedo has “a greenish patina of mold.” He debates going. The letterhead shows comedy and tragedy masks. “They don’t want anything but smilers out there,” he tells Bill. “Unhappy failures need not apply.”
Then the reversal: “Maybe an unhappy failure is exactly what they need to see.”
Chapter 3: The Machine Breaking Down
Dwayne’s symptoms multiply. Eleven moons over the Mildred Barry Memorial Center for the Arts. A giant duck directing traffic. He maintains secrecy. “The bad chemicals in his head were fed up with secrecy. They wanted Dwayne Hoover to be proud of his disease.”
Francine Pefko, his secretary and mistress, thinks he’s getting happier—he’s singing “The Old Lamplighter” and “Blue Moon,” songs from his youth. Nobody recognizes danger. Only Harry LeSabre, sales manager, 20 years with Dwayne, says it aloud: “Something’s come over Dwayne.”
Vonnegut gives us Dwayne’s collateral for buying the Pontiac agency: stock in what became Barrytron Limited, inherited during the Great Depression when it was called Robo-Magic Corporation of America. Motto: “Goodbye, Blue Monday.”
Harry tries to warn Francine. Vernon Garr the mechanic hasn’t noticed—his wife Mary is schizophrenic, believes Vernon is trying to turn her brains into plutonium. The chapter maps a city where everyone’s chemicals are compromised, where “Why me?” is the most common question after people are “loaded into ambulances.”
Then Dwayne explodes at Harry about Harry’s clothes: “Why don’t you get a bunch of cotton waste from Vern Garr, soak it in blue Sunoco, and burn up your fucking wardrobe?” Hawaiian Week is coming. Dwayne wants changes. The problem: Harry is a secret transvestite. When Dwayne mentions “the sexual offender’s wing of the Adult Correctional Institution at Shepherdstown,” Harry has to suspect his secret is out. He could get five years at hard labor.
Dwayne’s Veterans Day weekend: his bad chemicals make him stick a loaded .38 in his mouth. Oil taste. Charcoal, potassium nitrate, sulfur inches from his brain. He shoots up his bathroom instead—toilet, basin, bathtub. The flamingo sandblasted on the shower door. “Dumb fucking bird.”
Nobody hears. The house is too well insulated: “inch and a half of plasterboard, a polystyrene vapor barrier, a sheet of aluminum foil, a three-inch air space...” The litany of insulation becomes prose-poem about American isolation.
Chapter 4-5: Trout’s Journey Begins
Trout in New York City movie theater, cheapest bed available. Dirty old men and dirty movies. He makes up new stories: the planet where atmosphere became poisonous, humanoids eating petroleum and coal, dirty movies showing people eating. The audience goes wild when a family dumps 30 pounds of leftovers into garbage.
He visits pornography shops, buys two of his own books, a tuxedo shirt with tangerine accessories. The cover of Now It Can Be Told shows a college professor being undressed by sorority girls, clock tower showing 9:10. Inside: nothing about professors or sororities. A letter from the Creator to the only creature with free will.
Trout gets mugged under the Queensborough Bridge. Money gone, blood from his ear, pants around ankles when police find him. He tells them he was kidnapped by “an intelligent gas from Pluto.” Reporter writes headline: “PLUTO BANDITS KIDNAP OLDSTER.” The mine-poison spreads. New York develops terror of the Pluto Gang. Puerto Rican boys in a ghetto basement form actual gang, paint logo on their jackets. Vonnegut draws it.
Chapter 6-7: Mary Young Dies, Trout Hitchhikes
Cross-cut: Dwayne in Plymouth Fury in vacant lot, listening to West Virginia radio. Offered health insurance, Bible with Jesus’s words in red capitals, plant that attracts disease-carrying insects. “All this was stored in Dwayne’s memory in case he should need it later on.”
Mary Young, 108, black, former slave’s daughter, dies in County Hospital nine miles away. Only witness: Cyprian Ukwende, Nigerian intern, feels no kinship with American blacks. Her last words, soundless: “Oh my, oh my.” She releases “a small cloud of telepathic butterflies.” One brushes Dwayne’s cheek. He hears: “Oh my, oh my.”
Trout hitchhikes in truck carrying 78,000 pounds of Spanish olives. Driver tells him about the Poison Marshes of New Jersey, factories making cat food and detergent. Trout’s response: “Up your ass with Mobil gas.” He argues God wasn’t a conservationist—volcanoes, tornadoes, Dutch elm disease. “Just about time we got our rivers cleaned up, you’d probably have the whole galaxy go up like a celluloid collar.”
The driver’s brother makes chemicals for killing plants in Vietnam. Trout: “Don’t worry about it. In the long run, he’s committing suicide.” They discuss whether life is serious. Trout: “It’s dangerous, I know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s serious, too.”
Chapter 8-10: 42nd Street, West Virginia, Bermuda
Trout on 42nd Street. Dangerous city: chemicals, uneven wealth distribution. People eating paint remover, Bang’s Disease pills for cattle, Norwegian hemorrhoid remedy. Black prostitutes from the rural South where “their ancestors had been used as agricultural machinery.” Signs everywhere: NO TRESPASSING. THIS MEANS YOU.
Trout’s story “This Means You”: Hawaiian islands where 40 people own everything, put up no-trespassing signs on all land. Federal government gives helium balloons to the million other people so they can float above the property they can’t touch.
The prostitutes work for a pimp. “He was a god to them. He took their free will away from them, which was perfectly all right. They didn’t want it anyway.”
Truck driver discusses Midland City. “The asshole of the universe,” he says. He was jailed in Libertyville, Georgia—town’s industry is pulping old books into toilet paper. In jail, reading his toilet paper, he encountered Trout’s The Barring-gaffner of Bagnialto, story about planet where government spins wheel to determine value of art. Amazing coincidence: Trout had never met a reader before. He doesn’t reveal he wrote it.
Mailboxes in West Virginia all say “Hoobler”—Dwayne’s stepparents’ original name before they changed it. “Everybody up here naturally assumed Hoobler was a nigger name.”
Chapter 11-13: Dwayne’s Lunch, Harry’s Destruction
Dwayne wakes at Holiday Inn, refreshed. Checks in (forgetting he co-owns it). The room is “irreproachable container for a human being.” Sanitary paper around toilet seat guarantees no “corkscrew-shaped little animals would crawl up his asshole.”
Morning: the asphalt between inn and agency has become trampoline. Dwayne “bloops” from dimple to dimple. Young black man (Wayne Hoobler, just paroled from Shepherdstown) polishing cars, burnishing them. His inner life: “His life was not worth living.” Prison his whole life since age nine. He has photograph of Dwayne in wallet, Dwayne’s motto underneath: “Ask anybody—you can trust Dwayne.”
Wayne tells Dwayne their names are so close, the good Lord meant them to work together. Dwayne shakes his head vaguely, walks away. Wayne’s heart broken.
Inside showroom: palm tree (telephone pole in burlap, plastic leaves, real coconuts). Dwayne’s forgotten Hawaiian Week. Then Harry LeSabre appears “wearing a lettuce-green leotard, straw sandals, a grass skirt, and a pink T-shirt” that says MAKE LOVE NOT WAR.
Harry and wife spent weekend concluding Dwayne didn’t suspect transvestism. Harry thought Dwayne just wanted wild clothes for promotion. “So here was the new Harry now, rosy with fear and excitement. He felt uninhibited and beautiful and lovable and suddenly free.”
Dwayne makes himself not see Harry. Treats him as invisible. “Every molecule in his body awaited Dwayne’s reaction. Each molecule ceased its business for a moment, put some distance between itself and its neighbors.” When Dwayne doesn’t respond, “His heart sent this message to his molecules: ‘For reasons obvious to us all, this galaxy will be dissolved.’”
The twins (Lyle and Kyle, Dwayne’s stepbrothers) report Sacred Miracle Cave crisis: industrial waste creating bubbles “stiff as Ping-Pong balls,” advancing toward Cathedral of Whispers. The bubbles smell like athlete’s foot, blister paint on Moby Dick (painted boulder), turn the pipe organ black. They ask to plug the passage with cement, abandon Jesse James skeleton and plaster slave statues. Dwayne approves.
Historical note: the farm where cave was discovered was started by ex-slave Josephus Hoobler. Dwayne’s stepfather acquired it after being hit by car, settlement gave him “a goddamn nigger farm.” First thing stepfather did: rip sign saying “Bluebird Farm” off mailbox.
Chapter 14-15: West Virginia Demolished, Dwayne’s Lunch
Truck carrying Trout crosses demolished West Virginia. Surface stripped for coal, coal turned to heat, heat gone to outer space. Mountains sliding into valleys. “The demolition of West Virginia had taken place with the approval of the executive, legislative, and judicial branches of the state government, which drew their power from the people.”
Trout sees capsized Cadillac in brook, old appliances, angel-faced child with Pepsi-Cola. Driver tells story about building that droned—full of people on roller skates, going around and around, nobody smiling. “They just went around and around.”
Steam whistles: “woo-woo-woo.” Dinosaur cries. Sound can’t escape atmosphere—”atmosphere of earth, relative to the planet, wasn’t even as thick as the skin of an apple.”
McDonald’s. Old miner: worked from age 10 to 62. “You never get out of them, even when you sleep. I dream mines.” Mineral rights owned by Rosewater Coal and Iron Company. “I walked on Rosewater land. I dug Rosewater coal. I lived in a Rosewater house... This whole world is Rosewater as far as they’re concerned.”
Dwayne at lunch develops echolalia. Radio: “You can always trust Dwayne.” Dwayne echoes: “Dwayne.” “Tornado in Texas.” “Texas.” “Unclean.” “Unclean.”
Wayne Hoobler plays hide-and-seek with employees, drifting between used cars and garbage cans, studying “Salem cigarettes and so on” as though health inspector.
Dwayne at Burger Chef. Patty Keene, 17, yellow hair, blue eyes, working to pay father’s cancer bills (ten times cost of all Hawaiian Week trips). She’s “stupid on purpose”—survival strategy for Midland City women who “trained themselves to be agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.”
Patty knows who Dwayne is. She’s never been this close to the supernatural. She imagines him waving magic wand at her troubles. She speaks bravely, testing if supernatural assistance is possible. Dwayne develops worse echolalia but fights it down.
Dwayne at construction site of new John F. Kennedy High School. Kicks dirt into cellar hole. Spits. Loses shoe in mud. Leans against old apple tree—”this had all been farmland when Dwayne was a boy.” Admires earth-moving machine. Asks white workman about horsepower. “I don’t know how many horsepower, but I know what we call it... We call it the hundred-nigger machine.”
Penis measurements: Dwayne 7 inches long, 2⅛ inches diameter. Unusually large, doesn’t know it. Trout 7 inches long, 1¼ inches diameter. National average given. Breast measurements. Hip measurements. Vonnegut cataloging bodies as though for warehouse inventory.
Chapter 16-17: Peanut Butter and Pioneering
Trout’s novel about advertising on planet where peanut butter ads featured averages—average number of children, average penis size (2 inches long, 3 inches inside diameter, 4¼ inches outside diameter). Ads asked readers to discover if they were superior or inferior to majority.
Earthlings preparing to conquer that planet. Infiltrated ad agency, rigged the statistics upward. Made everyone feel below average in every respect. “Then the Earthling armored space ships came in.” Token resistance—the natives felt too inferior to fight back.
Trout sees fire extinguisher branded “EXCELSIOR.” Asks driver why anyone would name fire extinguisher that. “Somebody must have liked the sound of it.” Trout makes up story about planet where language kept turning into pure music, leaders had to invent “new and much uglier vocabularies” to resist musical transformation.
Sign: “VISIT SACRED MIRACLE CAVE—162 MILES.”
Trout reads his own book, the one that will destroy Dwayne. The Creator apologizes to the experimental creature, promises banquet at Waldorf Astoria, transfer to virgin planet. Living cells from his palms stirred into soupy sea. They’ll evolve. “Whatever shapes they assumed, they would have free will.”
The man yells things to surprise the Creator: “Cheese!” “Wouldn’t you really rather drive a Buick?” The angel investigates, takes form of 800-pound cinnamon bear, asks why he yells these things. “Because I felt like it, you stupid machine.”
Tombstone on virgin planet: “NOT EVEN THE CREATOR OF THE UNIVERSE KNEW WHAT THE MAN WAS GOING TO SAY NEXT... Perhaps the man was a better universe in its infancy.”
Chapter 18-20: Bunny Hoover, Rabo Karabekian, Vonnegut’s Presence
Bunny Hoover dressing for work. Piano player at Holiday Inn cocktail lounge. Poor, lives in dangerous Fairchild Hotel. Pale as blind fish from Sacred Miracle Cave (extinct, flushed into Ohio River years ago). Vegetarian, no friends, no lovers, no pets. Former cadet colonel at Prairie Military Academy.
Bunny’s secret: transcendental meditation. Maharishi Mahesh Yogi taught him for $35 and handkerchief. Bunny chants “Aum” internally, becomes “skin-diver in the depths of his mind.” Words float by: “Blue.” “Clair de Lune.” Refreshed, he returns.
Military school from age 10: “eight years of uninterrupted sports, buggery, and fascism.” Mother told him she was becoming unhappier, hinted Dwayne was monster (wasn’t true—all in her head). “There are secrets I will carry to my grave.” Her biggest secret: “Celia Hoover was crazy as a bedbug.”
Vonnegut’s mother was too. Both beautiful, both boiled over with chaotic talk, both committed suicide, both had same bizarre symptom: couldn’t have pictures taken—would crash to knees, protect head with arms “as though somebody was about to club her to death.”
Rabo Karabekian (minimal painter) and Beatrice Keedsler (Gothic novelist) at piano bar. Karabekian’s painting cost $50,000—”Temptation of St. Anthony,” 20 feet wide, 16 feet high, Hawaiian Avocado field with single vertical stripe of DayGlo orange reflecting tape. “Scandal what the painting cost.”
Karabekian: “This has to be the asshole of the universe.”
Traffic jam—fatal accident at Exit 10A. Trout gets out, walks toward Holiday Inn. Examines himself in truck’s rearview mirror—caked blood on ear, dog shit on shoulder. Message on truck: “PEERLESS.” Fire extinguisher inside: “EXCELSIOR.”
Vonnegut announces his presence. “I was on a par with the Creator of the Universe there in the dark in the cocktail lounge.” He shrinks universe to ball one light year in diameter, explodes it, disperses it. Bartender (Harold Newcomb Wilbur) he created, gave him Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart with oak-leaf clusters. Second most decorated veteran in Midland City.
Vonnegut makes phone ring. Puts most decorated veteran (Ned Lingamon) on other end—penis 800 miles long, 210 miles diameter, practically all in fourth dimension. Vietnam vet. Cops arrested him. “They say I killed my baby.” Cynthia Anne. She cried and cried, wouldn’t shut up. Congressional Medal of Honor on his chest, lowest crime an American can commit on his conscience.
Vonnegut: “I had come to the Arts Festival incognito. I was there to watch a confrontation between two human beings I had created: Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout.” Mirrored sunglasses. “Where other people in the cocktail lounge had eyes, I had two holes into another universe. I had leaks.”
Chapter 21-22: The Collision
Trout enters cocktail lounge. Feet burning in plastic shells from Sugar Creek. Rabo Karabekian surrounded by new friends—his speech about the painting has been “splendidly received.” He explained what the vertical stripe meant: “the awareness of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent... Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.”
St. Anthony’s picture should show “one vertical, unwavering band of light.” Idiot about to be electrocuted at Shepherdstown—”strip away the idiocy, the bars, the waiting electric chair, the uniform of the guard, the gun of the guard, the bones and meat of the guard. What is that perfect picture which any five-year-old can paint? Two unwavering bands of light.”
Midland City: “Citizens of Midland City, I salute you. You have given a home to a masterpiece.”
Bartender flicks on ultraviolet lights. Clothes impregnated with fluorescent materials light up. Bunny’s teeth glow—toothpaste with fluorescent chemicals. Brightest light: Kilgore Trout’s evening shirt bosom. “It might have been the top of a slumping, open sack of radioactive diamonds.”
Trout hunches forward. Shirt bosom becomes parabolic dish, searchlight aimed at Dwayne. “The sudden light roused Dwayne from his trance.” Dwayne stares into Trout’s bosom. Remembers stepfather’s story about why there are no niggers in Shepherdstown. Signs at city limits: “NIGGER, THIS IS SHEPHERDSTOWN. GOD HELP YOU IF THE SUN EVER SETS ON YOU HERE.”
Family got off boxcar one night, moved into empty shack. “So a mob went down there at midnight. They took the man out, and they sawed him in two on the top strand of a barbed-wire fence.” Dwayne remembered rainbow of oil on Sugar Creek when he heard that. Forty years ago.
Trout suspects he’s sitting near his creator. Vonnegut draws E=MC². “It was a flawed equation, as far as I was concerned. There should have been an A in there somewhere for awareness.”
Chapter 23-24: Dwayne Reads, The Rampage Begins
Dwayne speed-reads Now It Can Be Told. “Dear Sir, poor Sir, brave Sir: You are an experiment by the Creator of the Universe. You are the only creature in the entire universe who has free will... Everybody else is a robot, a machine.”
“You are pooped and demoralized. Why wouldn’t you be? Of course it is exhausting, having to reason all the time in a universe which wasn’t meant to be reasonable.”
Robots programmed to write books, invent religions, commit atrocities, show kindness—”unfeelingly, automatically, inevitably, to get a reaction from Y-O-U.”
“Your mother was programmed to bawl out your father for being a defective money-making machine, and your father was programmed to bawl her out for being a defective housekeeping machine.”
Dwayne stands. Stiff with “awe of his own strength and righteousness.” Approaches Bunny. Shoves his head onto piano keys, rolls it “like a cantaloupe.” Blood, spit, mucus on keys. “Goddamn cocksucking machine!”
Beatrice Keedsler, Bonnie McMahon pull Dwayne away. He punches Beatrice in jaw, Bonnie in belly. “Never hit a woman, right?” Yells about Celia: “She was that kind of machine!”
Map of rampage next morning: dotted line from cocktail lounge to Francine’s office (breaks her jaw, three ribs), back to Holiday Inn, across Sugar Creek to median divider. Eleven people hospitalized. Subdued by state police. “Thank God you’re here,” Dwayne says as they cuff him.
Francine dragged outside. Dwayne to crowd: “Best fucking machine in the state. Wind her up, and she’ll fuck you and say she loves you, and she won’t shut up till you give her a Colonel Sanders Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.”
Trout jumps Dwayne from behind. Dwayne bites off topmost joint of Trout’s ring finger. Spits it into Sugar Creek.
Chapter 25-26: Martha, The Hospital, The Meeting
Ambulance called: Martha Simmons Memorial Mobile Disaster Unit. Full-size bus converted to mobile hospital. Named for woman who died of rabies from bat she tried to save after reading Albert Schweitzer biography.
Physicians: Cyprian Ukwende (Nigeria), Khashdrahr Miasma (Bangladesh). Driver: Eddie Key, descendant of Francis Scott Key, knows 600+ ancestors by name. Black families’ oral tradition: one person per generation memorizes family history. Eddie feels his ancestors using his eyes—focuses on American flag. “Still wave, man.”
Dwayne in restraints thinks he’s on virgin planet. Yells: “Goodbye, Blue Monday!” Then: “Not a cough in a carload!”
Trout climbs aboard, finger bandaged. Sits behind Eddie Key. Holds up hand: “A slip of the lip can sink a ship.”
Vonnegut keeps distance from violence “even though I had created Dwayne and his violence and the city and the sky above and the earth below.” Comes out with broken watch crystal, broken toe. “Somebody jumped backward to get out of Dwayne’s way. He broke my watch crystal even though I had created him, and he broke my toe.”
Don Breedlove (rapist) gets ear destroyed—Dwayne cups hand, hits him, creates “terrific air pressure.” “Dwayne would never hear anything with that ear evermore again.”
Epilogue: Liberation
Trout in hospital basement. Gets lost, finds morgue (moons about mortality), finds X-ray room (wonders if something bad growing inside). Wrong stairs—ends up in recovery wards, not lobby.
Passes Elgin Washington’s room. Pimp, 26, “fabulously well-to-do,” foot amputated by Miasma but forgotten. Sniffed cocaine, telepathic messages amplified. Calls to Trout: “Psst. Psst.” Fisherman for souls.
Tells Trout he’s dying. “I want you to listen to me while I whistle the song of the Nightingale.” Explains: “Peculiar beauty to the ear of the Nightingale, much beloved by poets, is the fact that it will only sing by moonlight.” Then imitates bird—every black person in Midland City can do this, legacy of Fred T. Barry’s mother imitating British Empire birds for servants during Depression.
Trout walks toward Arts Center, five miles. Vonnegut waits in rented Plymouth Duster, smoking. “My penis was three inches long and five inches in diameter. Its diameter was a world’s record, as far as I knew.”
Doberman Pinscher (Kazak) from earlier draft attacks. Vonnegut leaps over automobile. Body floods with adrenaline, coagulants, glucose-corticoids. Then: “my body took one defensive measure which I am told was without precedent in medical history... I also retracted my testicles into my abdominal cavity, pulled them into my fuselage like the landing gear of an airplane.”
Vonnegut chases Trout in car. “Whoa, whoa, Mr. Trout.” Trout stops, exhausted. Leans against fence. General Electric sign behind him: “PROGRESS IS OUR MOST IMPORTANT PRODUCT.”
Vonnegut from darkened car: “Mr. Trout—I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my books.”
“I’m your Creator. You’re in the middle of a book right now—close to the end of it, actually.”
Transports Trout: Taj Mahal, Venice, Dar es Salaam, surface of sun, back to Midland City. Bermuda of his childhood, Indianapolis of Vonnegut’s. Trout crashes to knees.
Vonnegut gets out of car. “I stopped with the tips of my shoes on the rim of the narrow field of his downcast eyes.”
“Mr. Trout... I love you. I have broken your mind to pieces. I want to make it whole.”
Holds apple. “I am approaching my fiftieth birthday, Mr. Trout. I am cleansing and renewing myself for the very different sorts of years to come. Under similar spiritual conditions, Count Tolstoy freed his serfs, Thomas Jefferson freed his slaves. I am going to set at liberty all the literary characters who have served me so loyally during my writing career.”
“Arise, Mr. Trout. You are free, you are free, you are free.”
Vonnegut disappears. “I somersaulted lazily and pleasantly through the void, which is my hiding place when I dematerialize.”
Trout’s cries fade. Voice is Vonnegut’s father’s voice. Mirror floats by—leak with mother-of-pearl frame. Vonnegut holds it to eye. Tear.
What Trout cried: “Make me young, make me young, make me young.”
“ETC.”
Bridge
What emerges from these chapters isn’t a novel in any conventional sense but an autopsy—Vonnegut performing a postmortem on American consciousness circa 1973. The patient died of bad chemicals (literal: Dwayne’s brain; metaphorical: the nation’s ideas) and worse ideas (Trout’s solipsistic science fiction that everyone’s a robot, you’re the only one with free will). The structure is deliberate chaos: Vonnegut drawing assholes and flags and vaginas, measuring penises to the eighth of an inch, cataloging the molecular composition of plastic and the insulation in Dwayne’s walls with same obsessive precision he uses for the genocide of 1492.
What follows isn’t a review of the book. It’s an attempt to reckon with what Vonnegut was trying to accomplish by writing a novel that actively sabotages novel-ness, that draws pictures where other writers would write paragraphs, that announces halfway through that the author is a character watching his other characters, that ends not with resolution but with “Make me young” and tears and “ETC.”
Part 2: The Literary Review Essay
The first thing you notice about Breakfast of Champions is that Kurt Vonnegut has stopped pretending. Not pretending to write a novel—he’s writing something called a novel, printing it between covers that promise a novel, but what he’s actually doing is performing an exorcism in public. “I think I am trying to clear my head of all the junk in there—the assholes, the flags, the underpants,” he writes in the preface. Then he draws an asshole. A twelve-pointed asterisk. He’s not kidding about the drawings.
The premise sounds like science fiction, which is fitting since the book’s about a science fiction writer: Kilgore Trout, invisible, convinced he’s dead, writes a novel (Now It Can Be Told) that falls into the hands of Dwayne Hoover, Pontiac dealer, who’s manufacturing bad chemicals in his brain. The book tells Dwayne he’s the only creature in the universe with free will. Everyone else is a robot. This idea—”mind poison,” Vonnegut calls it—turns Dwayne into a homicidal maniac. He hospitalizes eleven people before state police subdue him on the grass median of Interstate 65.
But that’s not what the book is about. That’s just the machinery Vonnegut uses to get himself from his fiftieth birthday to whatever comes after it. What the book is about—and Vonnegut makes this explicit halfway through, when he inserts himself as a character wearing mirrored sunglasses in the Holiday Inn cocktail lounge—is the relationship between the stories a culture tells itself and the atrocities that culture commits.
Here’s what Vonnegut does that no one had done before, or at least not with this ferocity: he draws the connection between narrative convention and moral evasion as a straight line. “I thought Beatrice Keedsler had joined hands with other old-fashioned storytellers to make people believe that life had leading characters, minor characters, significant details, insignificant details, that it had lessons to be learned, tests to be passed, and a beginning, a middle, and an end.” Americans, he argues, are “doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.”
The drawings aren’t decoration. They’re the point. When Vonnegut draws the American flag, it’s estrangement—making you see the thing you’ve saluted your whole life as though you’ve never seen it before. Same with his drawing of an asshole (the twelve-pointed asterisk that recurs throughout), a vagina (”This was where babies came from”), underpants, a handgun, a cow, a hamburger, a chicken, a bucket of fried chicken. He’s showing you the Republic as a child might see it, if that child were drawing in the margins during a massacre.
The genius move—and it’s genuinely radical even now, fifty years later—is Vonnegut’s refusal to hide his manipulation of the machinery. Most novelists pretend the story is unfolding organically, that the characters have autonomous existence. Vonnegut demolishes that pretense. Halfway through, he shows up as a character. Mirrored sunglasses in a dark bar. “Where other people in the cocktail lounge had eyes, I had two holes into another universe.” He makes the phone ring because he needs someone to answer it. He puts words in Rabo Karabekian’s mouth because the book needs those words said. He creates Harold Newcomb Wilbur the bartender on the spot, gives him medals, stuffs them in a dresser drawer.
Why? Because he’s making explicit what every novelist does implicitly: plays God with human-shaped puppets. The difference is Vonnegut won’t let you forget it. “I could only guide their movements approximately, since they were such big animals. There was inertia to overcome. It wasn’t as though I was connected to them by steel wires. It was more as though I was connected to them by stale rubber bands.”
This connects to the book’s central horror, which isn’t Dwayne’s rampage but the premise that enables it. Trout’s novel tells Dwayne everyone else is a machine. Vonnegut’s novel tells us the same thing, but honestly. Not “everyone except you” (the lie that poisons Dwayne) but “everyone including you.” We’re all machines—meat machines with rusty hinges and feeble springs, running on bad chemicals, programmed by worse ideas. The only thing that’s not machinery is awareness itself. Karabekian’s vertical stripe. The “unwavering band of light” at the core of every creature.
The book’s structure enacts this. Vonnegut interrupts himself constantly—to draw pictures, to give penis measurements (Dwayne: 7 inches long, 2⅛ inches diameter; Trout: 7 inches long, 1¼ inches diameter; world average: 5⅞ inches long, 1½ inches diameter), to explain that mirrors are called “leaks” in Bermuda (they’re not—Trout made it up, Vonnegut made Trout up), to describe the molecular structure of the plastic fouling Sugar Creek. The interruptions aren’t digressions. They’re the method. They force you to see the book as book, the story as construction, the novelist as someone making deliberate choices about what to include, what to leave out, what to draw, what to merely describe.
And what he chooses to draw tells you everything about what he thinks has poisoned America. Flags. Assholes. Guns. The Statue of Liberty as “ice cream cone on fire.” Corporate logos on trucks (PYRAMID, AJAX, PEERLESS, HERTZ—phonetically “HURTS”). A tombstone for a high school football player killed in 1924 (62-foot obelisk, marble football on top, tallest structure in Midland City for decades). The sanitary paper loop around the toilet seat guaranteeing “no corkscrew-shaped little animals would crawl up his asshole and eat up his wiring.”
But also: his father’s feet (long, narrow, sensitive—given to Trout). His mother’s symptom (crashing to knees when cameras aimed, shared by Celia Hoover, both women suicides). The crossroads of America where he saw syphilitic man shuddering, trying to make legs obey, brain being eaten by corkscrews, “wires which had to carry the instructions weren’t insulated anymore, or were eaten clear through.”
This is Vonnegut’s autobiography disguised as science fiction disguised as conventional novel disguised as illustrated children’s book disguised as memoir. The digression about Phoebe Hurty in the preface does more work than most novels’ entire plots. She taught him impoliteness as grace. Believed impoliteness would shape American paradise when prosperity came. “Now her sort of impoliteness is fashionable, but nobody believes anymore in a new American paradise.”
The book was written in 1973. Vietnam still happening. Nixon still president. Americans still shooting each other (Vonnegut gives us the 14-year-old who killed his parents rather than show them his bad report card). The environment actively being destroyed (Sugar Creek producing plastic-coated ping-pong balls, West Virginia strip-mined to oblivion, Cleveland river catching fire annually). And Vonnegut’s diagnosis: We got here because we believed the wrong stories.
Not just Vietnam or slavery or genocide of Native Americans (though he prosecutes all three with Nuremberg-level precision). The deeper crime: narrative itself as currently practiced. The lie that life has main characters and supporting characters, significant details and insignificant details, lessons to learn, tests to pass, beginnings middles ends. This lie, Vonnegut argues, is what makes Americans treat each other like machines. Like bit players. Like disposable extras.
So he writes an anti-novel. “I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out.”
Does he succeed? Not remotely. Can’t be done. The attempt to give every fact equal weight produces not documentary but fever dream—penis measurements next to molecular diagrams next to lynching next to hamburger next to tombstone next to recipe for gunpowder (potassium nitrate, charcoal, sulfur). The equality of weightiness produces not clarity but chaos, which may be Vonnegut’s point. “Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead.”
The result is the least orderly book a major American publisher had printed up to that point. Chapter 19 is Vonnegut shrinking the universe to a ball one light year in diameter, exploding it, answering questions: “How old is the universe?” “It is one-half second old, but that half-second has lasted one quintillion years so far.” Creating Harold Newcomb Wilbur the bartender, giving him medals, making the phone ring so Wilbur can answer it and Vonnegut can put Ned Lingamon on the other end—Vietnam vet with penis 800 miles long, arrested for killing his baby daughter Cynthia Anne who wouldn’t stop crying.
Why tell us Lingamon’s penis is 800 miles long? Because Vonnegut’s showing you the absurdity of precision without purpose, measurement without meaning. Same reason he tells you Dwayne’s penis is 7 inches long and 2⅛ inches in diameter, Trout’s is 7 inches long but only 1¼ inches in diameter, that Patty Keene (the 17-year-old waitress working to pay her father’s cancer bills, raped by Don Breedlove in the Bannister Memorial Fieldhouse parking lot) has 34-inch hips, 26-inch waist, 34-inch bosom.
What are you supposed to do with that information? Nothing. It’s useless. That’s the point. Vonnegut is drowning you in information that means nothing, details that don’t advance plot or deepen character or do any of the things details are supposed to do in well-made novels. He’s showing you what happens when you take the accumulation-of-detail approach to its logical conclusion: paralysis. Meaninglessness. The Pan-Galactic Memory Bank (Trout’s novel-within-novel) where hero checks out realistic novel from library, reads 60 pages, returns it. Librarian asks why. “I already know about human beings.”
But Vonnegut can’t fully commit to chaos. The book has shape despite itself. Trout and Dwayne converge. Dwayne reads Trout’s book. Dwayne goes berserk. Vonnegut intervenes. The scaffolding is there even as Vonnegut’s trying to dismantle it, which creates the book’s central tension: Can you write an anti-narrative that’s still readable? Can you give everyone equal importance and still have anyone matter?
The answer Vonnegut stumbles into—and I think he stumbles, doesn’t plan—is Rabo Karabekian’s speech about the painting. Twenty feet wide, sixteen feet high, Hawaiian Avocado green field, single vertical stripe of DayGlo orange reflecting tape. Cost: $50,000. Midland City outraged. Then Karabekian explains:
“The painting did not exist until I made it. Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town... I now give you my word of honor that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal—the ‘I am’ to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us—in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us.”
This is Vonnegut’s out. The vertical stripe is the book’s actual subject. Not Dwayne or Trout or Midland City or America—the awareness itself. The part that’s not machinery. And Karabekian’s speech is what changes Vonnegut, what makes him capable of ending the book. “Now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far.”
He’d been trying to write without caring about his characters—treating them as machines, same as he accused America of treating people as machines. Karabekian’s speech gives him permission to care about the awareness even while acknowledging the machinery. “As three unwavering bands of light, we were simple and separate and beautiful. As machines, we were flabby bags of ancient plumbing and wiring, of rusty hinges and feeble springs.”
The ending should be bathetic—Vonnegut meets Trout, announces himself as Creator, sets Trout free, Trout begs “Make me young, make me young, make me young.” On paper it’s embarrassing. In practice it devastates because Vonnegut earns it through 300 pages of refusing sentiment, demolishing pretension, prosecuting American crimes with deadpan horror.
When he writes “His voice was my father’s voice. I heard my father, and I saw my mother in the void,” you believe him because he’s spent the book giving Trout his father’s feet (long, narrow, sensitive, varicose-veined), his father’s shins, his father’s face when his father was an old, old man. The personal and political collapse into each other. Trout begging to be young is Vonnegut’s father begging to be young is every American begging to be innocent again, before the chemicals went bad, before the ideas turned poisonous.
Does the book work? Depends what you mean by work. As novel: No. Too much stops and starts, too many penis measurements, too much Vonnegut drawing assholes when he could be developing character. As testimony: Absolutely. This is what it looked like in 1973 to be fifty years old in America, watching your country lose a war it started for no reason, poison its rivers for profit, shoot its presidents and its children, turn its citizens into “agreeing machines instead of thinking machines.”
The image that stays with me isn’t Dwayne’s rampage or Trout’s suffering. It’s Wayne Hoobler among the used cars during Hawaiian Week, studying garbage cans when employees approach so he won’t be ordered off property, drifting back to the cars when they leave, “keeping the boiled eggs of his eyes peeled for the real Dwayne Hoover.” Wayne just out of Shepherdstown after being caged since age nine. Wayne who photographs Dwayne’s face (clipped from newspaper ads: “Ask anybody—you can trust Dwayne”), keeps it in his wallet, on his cell wall. Wayne for whom the only dream is to work for Dwayne, live in place he’s named secretly: Fairyland.
Dwayne breaks Wayne’s heart by walking away. Dwayne later tries to beat Wayne (Wayne dodges—”genius at dodging blows”). And then the runway lights of Will Fairchild Memorial Airport come on, and Wayne sees his dream realized: “miles and miles of gorgeous jewelry.” Inside Wayne’s head an electric sign spelling FAIRYLAND.
This is what Vonnegut means about Americans living inside stories. Wayne’s story is: work hard, be good, Dwayne will save you. Dwayne’s story is (before Trout): work hard, be good, you’ll be fabulously well-to-do. Trout’s story: you’re invisible, you’re dead, nobody will ever read you. Then all three stories collide with the truth, which is: the chemicals are bad, the ideas are poison, and there is no Fairyland.
Vonnegut’s solution—setting his characters free, holding an apple, announcing “You are free, you are free, you are free”—reads like wish-fulfillment unless you see it as what it is: the only ethical response available to a novelist who’s realized he’s been playing God with meat puppets. He can’t undo the novel. He can acknowledge what he’s done. He can try, however inadequately, to make amends.
The book ends with “ETC.” Not resolution. Not closure. Acknowledgment that “life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly,” that stories don’t end, they just stop. Vonnegut stops here. Trout goes on (Vonnegut wrote him into other books). Dwayne goes on (ends up on skid row, “one more withered balloon of an old man”). America goes on.
What Vonnegut proved: You can’t write an anti-novel that’s genuinely anti-novel and have it remain readable. The form resists. He proved something else too: You can write a novel that’s honest about its own dishonesty, that shows its seams, that draws assholes and measures penises and says “This is a very bad book you’re writing” to itself and still—still—make people feel the weight of what it’s like to be alive in a place and time where the ideas are poison and the chemicals are bad and the only sacred thing left is the awareness itself, the unwavering band of light that persists no matter what preposterous adventure befalls us.
“We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane.” That’s Trout’s epitaph in 1981, eight years in the future from the book’s 1973. Vonnegut wrote this in 1973 knowing what happened in America between 1973 and 1981, knowing what would keep happening. The ideas didn’t get more humane. Neither did the chemicals. What Vonnegut offers isn’t hope. It’s clarity. Sometimes that’s enough.