In Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut intends to release his characters from his control. In doing so, he shows their unreadiness to cope with freedom, or to measure up to its responsibilities. In a sense, he is telling us that we are all living in our own private novels, but our actions do not, in reality, follow a coherent plot. Our lives collide and interfere with each other. We inevitably become what we do….

Vonnegut's people were once machines that one could wind up and set loose. He wants to change that, because they are also part of his own machinery. Even after his decision to free them, they continue to behave as if they were acting out a drama beyond their own control, with major roles and minor roles to play, and a Providence to grant them some means of atonement for their mechanical failures.

In Breakfast of Champions human machines are broken down into their chemical and physical components more thoroughly than ever before in a work by Vonnegut. The story is told in a sense of short, narrative bursts which describe the histories and actions of people in and around Midland City….

Kilgore Trout is especially groomed to be Vonnegut's liason with the rest of creation. He is the only "machine" around possessing more than just the faintest glimmer of cosmic consciousness.

Existing as a character in the book, the author is, understandably, the most crucial being in the book. He presents himself candidly, by inserting personal asides and encouraging the reader to jump often from fiction to reality and back again. The resulting style is sometimes annoying. Vonnegut, though, is at his best when detailing the relations between the biographies of his characters, who can hardly begin to imagine the influences they exert on each other. He has so much sympathy, in fact, for their lack of imagination that occasional annoyance can be easily overlooked.

At any rate, the difficulties of emancipation are hopefully more evident to us, (having read the book) than to those with less imagination. Emancipation, we learn, is not equivalent to freedom. Wayne Hoobler has been "freed" from the security of prison and turned loose in a hostile world which offers him no purpose. Dwayne Hoover's mind is "freed" from the restrictions of reality by his madness, yet his body must remain a straight-jacketed machine, unable to follow where his fantasies lead. Kilgore Trout, who is freed (by Vonnegut's intervention) from any uncertainty as to the purpose of his existence, suffers, ironically, from the logical projection of Vonnegut's own plight. Having met his maker, Trout finds him omnisciently infallible, but unfortunately lacking the power to rejuvenate his elderly creation. (p. 75)

We can only guess that Vonnegut is not at all comfortable in the atmosphere he has bestowed upon those made in his likeness and image. Their world is too much like his own for complete comfort. There is little enough love, of any kind, except his own. The pathos of his beings' common plight serves, at times, to amuse and distract him from the awful burden of absolute and final authority. (pp. 75-6)

[Those] who have enjoyed Vonnegut's previous books can hardly begrudge the author his time in such a harsh spotlight as the one he turns on himself. (p. 76)