Breakfast of Champions

plus one quotation from Jailbird, which I forgot to make a post on.

I observe how profoundly serious Nature has made her about a rubber ice-cream cone — brown rubber cone, pink rubber ice cream. I have to wonder what equally ridiculous commitments to bits of trash I myself have made. Not that it matters at all. We are here for no purpose, unless we can invent one. Of that I am sure. The human condition in an exploding universe would not have been altered one iota if, rather than live as I have, I had done nothing but carry a rubber ice-cream cone from closet to closet for sixty years

And again I say how much easier the existentialism project would've been if I read more of Vonnegut in grade 12.

Anyways, Breakfast of Champions. This along with Slaughterhouse-Five is Vonnegut's two most popular books (several characters appear in both books too)? I do like it very much, just not as much as the other ones.
On a side note, publishers should really release a collector's set of Vonnegut books with limited edition cover art, I would very much like to own that.

Synopsis from Amazon:

"We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are humane." So reads the tombstone of downtrodden writer Kilgore Trout, but we have no doubt who's really talking: his alter ego Kurt Vonnegut. Health versus sickness, humanity versus inhumanity--both sets of ideas bounce through this challenging and funny book. As with the rest of Vonnegut's pure fantasy, it lacks the shimmering, fact-fueled rage that illuminates Slaughterhouse-Five. At the same time, that makes this book perhaps more enjoyable to read. Breakfast of Champions is a slippery, lucid, bleakly humorous jaunt through (sick? inhumane?) America circa 1973, with Vonnegut acting as our Virgil-like companion.
The book follows its main character, auto-dealing solid-citizen Dwayne Hoover, down into madness, a condition brought on by the work of the aforementioned Kilgore Trout. As Dwayne cracks, then crumbles, Breakfast of Champions coolly shows the effects his dementia has on the web of characters surrounding him. It's not much of a plot, but it's enough for Vonnegut to air unique opinions on America, sex, war, love, and all of his other pet topics--you know, the only ones that really count.

The plot surrounding Hwayne Hoover reminds me of American Psycho, especially through quotation #2 below. I found the "mergers&acquisition and murder&execution" way too funny.

"I wont know myself until i find out whether life is serious or not" said Trout. "Its dangerous, i know, and it can hurt a lot. That doesn't necessarily mean its serious, too"

Every person had a clearly defined part to play. If a person stopped living up to expectation, because of bad chemicals or one thing or another, everybody went on imagining that the person was living up to expectations anyways.

It is the past which scared the bejesus out of me.

This much I knew and know: I was making myself hideously uncomfortable by not narrowing my attention to details of life which  were immediately important, and by refusing to believe what my neighbours believed

"You know what truth is?" "Its some crazy thing my neighbour believes. If I want to make friends with him, I ask him what he believes. He tells me, and I say 'yeah, yeah - ain't it the truth?'

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. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers can do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trade will understand that there's no order in the world around us, that we mist adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

 I would definitely quote the last quotation if I ever had to give a commencement speech.