Slaughterhouse-Five from the start suggested the possibility that Vonnegut had written the crucial personal experiences out of his system, and I think that this is one reason we have all tended to wait with particular interest, and perhaps a little uncertainty, for what would subsequently come from him. In prefacing [Happy Birthday, Wanda June], Vonnegut declared that he was through with novels and with characters who were "spooks"…. The end appeared at hand, if one dared take the author seriously. In Breakfast of Champions he announced the discarding of old characters and themes, while also bringing certain other lines of development in his fiction to their seeming logical ends. With Vonnegut's observation that Breakfast of Champions spun off from Slaughterhouse-Five, one could imagine that it represented a final housecleaning. But then came Slapstick, a continuation which seems to promise more of the same. (pp. 151-52)

[Vonnegut's self consciousness] appears to have grown. That is suggested by his talk of abandoning the novel in his preface to Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and by his decrying the qualities of his books … in the introduction to Breakfast of Champions. The preface to Between Time and Timbuktu reveals more of the same: Vonnegut talking about the inadequacy of film since the author cannot place himself in the work…. And in prefacing Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons he speaks of the problems of being a "guru" addressing college audiences, about critics writing of him as if he were already dead, and about "British critics" who find him sometimes too sentimental. More important than these prefatory musings, however, are the signs of such preoccupations in the content and style of the works.

In this respect, the projection of self into the novel changes markedly in nature between Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut has been "present" in many of the earlier novels, in the sense that they have directly or obliquely autobiographical content. The change at this point is in the manner of the intrusion of the autobiographical "I." In Slaughterhouse-Five, the appearance of Vonnegut himself in an intermittent minor role in the action—"that was me"—is framed by the first and last chapters, in which Vonnegut speaks from the present of the writing of the novel. The technique seems entirely appropriate in a novel with a subject matter which is at one level intensely personal and which is viewed reflectively. It enables Vonnegut to combine his retrospective perspective as author rationalizing and ordering past experience and his contemporaneous reactions as participant in the events shown. It is also appropriate (and an effective structural device) in a novel which emphasizes time, the interrelationships of time periods, and the effects of time on perception or "truth." In the later novel, the introduction of self as character seems a little less comfortable or natural. The difference in context almost provides a satisfactory answer: Slaughterhouse-Five is probably Vonnegut's most serious novel, while Breakfast of Champions may be his most whimsical. Breakfast of Champions is also intensely personal, as its preface explains. But even when an author writes a book as a birthday present to himself, if he publishes it, it will be read by others, who, even if disposed to wish him Many Happy Returns, are still likely to approach it much as they would any other work of fiction. The test then becomes one of how well the introduction of author as character is supported not by exterior, prefatory assertion but by thematic, structural, and generic context. This does not mean an expectation of a traditional concept of the fictional world as "real," not to be violated by authorial admissions of artifice to shatter our willing suspension of disbelief…. [What] Vonnegut does here is rather different. An author's admission that a fictional world is a fiction, is artifice, frequently works in the direction of emphasizing the involvement of the reader in the creative process. In Breakfast of Champions the direction is almost opposite. The author is present in the fictional world as character and creator simultaneously, telling us how he chooses to have other characters perform. This tends to put the reader in the position of observer, even if an observer who is "let in" on why actions occur or what will happen next. Vonnegut's projection of self into this novel is such that the reader finds it hard to escape the sense that Breakfast of Champions at least in the later chapters, is personal in a rather exclusive way. This particular kind of personal quality has a certain awkwardness, one which may be resolved in either first-person fiction (by a consistent character-narrator relationship) or autobiography, but which in Breakfast of Champions remains unsettled. The effect results in the reader's feeling partially estranged in the fictional world into which he has apparently been invited.

Vonnegut's increased self-consciousness also reveals itself stylistically. Here Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons makes interesting reading. Some of the earlier pieces (for example, "Brief Encounters on the Inland Waterway") seem strikingly fluent and almost languid in comparison with the later prose. In Breakfast of Champions the statements are terse, the rhythms brusque, the sentences short and staccato in the manner of the later abrupt style. The novel also abounds with the repetitions which distinguish the later work. Where Slaughterhouse-Five uses the "So it goes" refrain effectively, this novel has the repeated injunction "Listen," the reiterated fade-out "And so on," and the inconclusive "Etc." There are other forms of repetition, such as the echoing of the last word of a paragraph as a solitary declaration proceding the next paragraph and the restatement of the thematic motto, "Goodbye Blue Monday." While this device has its purpose in the context of the novel, repetition succeeds rather less well here than in Slaughterhouse-Five. As with the curt phrasing, the resurrection of familiar characters and scenes, and even the characteristic, bitingly understated asides on current social events, it gives the impression of being self-consciously employed—as indeed Vonnegut's prefatory statement that he is saying "good-bye to all that" implies it is.

This impression becomes disturbing for several reasons. The most obvious one is that it might suggest a decline of powers, or efforts, on Vonnegut's part, since the phenomenon of the American novelist's succumbing to self-parody in later years is not an unfamiliar one. The personal, prefatory remarks in Breakfast of Champions, revealing ambivalence and weariness, might contribute to this impression. So might the relative lack of originality, of scope, power, of sheer size, in the content of the novel itself. The tendency to self-imitation might naturally invite the judgment that Vonnegut is playing to the known responses of an established following. Doubtless the perennial Vonnegut detractors would say that. Some have always accused him of playing "guru" to one generation, although his publishing history and the content of his fiction make the charge ludicrous. What seems apparent is that in the wake of the success of Slaughterhouse-Five, as book and film, Vonnegut has felt the pressures of fame and of those who would cast him in the guru role, as he discloses in the preface to Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons. This, and other personal circumstances, doubtless contributed to making the years following the publication of Slaughterhouse-Five distracting ones for Vonnegut. The precise relationship between personal trauma and the form of Breakfast of Champions would be difficult, if not impossible, to define. But Vonnegut's preface alone suggests that there is a relationship, and the plot almost certainly confirms it. (pp. 153-56)

[Breakfast of Champions] has more strengths than it has generally been credited with…. Perhaps inevitably, the novel's strengths are closely related to some of its relative weaknesses. One of these comes in the area of characterization. Vonnegut has often been apologetic about this part of his work, perhaps more than he need be. True, many of his characters appear two-dimensional or stereotyped. But that is also true of characters in some major "serious" American novels. Furthermore, Vonnegut has shown the ability, on the one hand, to create some major characters of considerable interest and depth and, on the other, to make a number of the two-dimensional lesser characters sharp and memorable. In Breakfast of Champions none of the characters amounts to what would normally be considered a really well-developed characterization. The two major figures, Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout, though clearly defined, immensely amusing, and quite memorable, remain essentially enlarged, two-dimensional secondary characters. Yet that is appropriate. Kurt Vonnegut is the central character of this novel, and Hoover and Trout have supporting roles both in the sense of being secondary to the author-protagonist and in the way they effectively enlarge and complete the central character. (pp. 157-58)

The interjection of self directly as character is much expanded in Breakfast of Champions, yet that figure remains far from a complete autobiographical portrait. Vonnegut's own presence in the novel is filled out by Hoover and Trout, each of whom embodies aspects of the author, and even by lesser figures such as Rabo Karabekian, the painter…. Rather like the older Billy Pilgrim …, Hoover can be seen as a modern Everyman figure, a version of the standard middle-class norm of success. He thus provides a vehicle for one of Vonnegut's favorite themes—the man who attains the stereotyped American goals but is left asking "What is the meaning of life?" or "What are people for?" In Vonnegut, such characters are seldom merely conveniences for social satire: they are treated with sympathy and understanding, embodying much of the Ordinary Man from whom the author never distances himself very far. (p. 158)

Perhaps the most important interrelating theme is that presented in Trout's Now It Can Be Told—the perception of people as robots…. Obviously, the idea of humans as robots connects with the Dwayne Hoover side of the story, with its theme of human behavior biochemically controlled. The two themes merge when the two characters meet in the bar in Midland City, where Trout gives Hoover a copy of the novel. The general concept and its implications are not new in Vonnegut. People behaving "as it was meant to happen," questions of free will, characters being treated as neither virtuous nor evil because they were simply doing all that was possible to them, have had prominence in Vonnegut's novels at least since The Sirens of Titan. But here the twin themes emerge with peculiar force and particular personal relevance. (pp. 161-62)

[Again], Trout becomes a vehicle for the expression of the author's own misgivings. Yet ultimately the personal significance of the bad-chemicals-and-robots theme finds expression through the unlikely character of Rabo Karabekian. (p. 162)

The danger comically present in Trout's Now It Can Be Told is its "solipsistic whimsy." The story, like many of Trout's, is written solipsistically; Trout develops an idea into a personal fantasy which he then imposes on a vision of the world. That danger becomes explicit when the book falls into the hands of the already solipsistic [Dwayne Hoover]…. (p. 163)

But behind the irony [of Vonnegut's presentation of Karabekian] resides a serious truth which could effectively counter many of the nightmares of robots, bad chemicals, and solipsism. Recognizing that within each individual being, within the physical "meat machine," lives an immaterial core of awareness entails a recognition of the peculiar individuality, the uniqueness, the "sacredness" of that being…. Such an awareness counters the solipsism which reduces others to robots, by recognizing … their uniqueness, their individual worth as beings endowed with their own perceptions and feelings. This recognition thus becomes a key to behaving toward others with humaneness. Similarly—and the outward and inward directions of this recognition are coalescent—self-respect also comes from affirming … and respecting one's own humanity. Thus, this characteristically simple perception makes possible the reversal of character-Vonnegut's earlier pessimistic conclusion, by arguing that there is something "sacred about myself or about any human being" and that we are not all merely "machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide." That discovery is Vonnegut's cocktail-lounge epiphany, the cause of his subsequent "rebirth" and "serenity." (pp. 165-66)

Above all, the tone must always be kept in mind when discussing Vonnegut. In Breakfast of Champions there is plenty of "yin and yang," of taking away what has been offered and undercutting what has been affirmed. There is spoofing; despite the use made of Karabekian's speech, his own personality and his painting of "an unwavering band of light" are surely mocked. The irreverent and the poignant stand side by side—Vonnegut's pathetically psychotic mother is "crazy as a bedbug." And there is the everpresent mix of the joyful and the pessimistic. While Vonnegut says that he finds serenity, and the general tone of the novel is upbeat, gloom remains. After all, the sacred awareness which he discovers continues to be ignored in the world around him. Even Vonnegut's freeing of his slaves, his characters, is ambivalent. Freed from their creator, they cease to have existence. Of course, the freeing of characters is a comic conception, as the ironic reference to Jefferson's freeing of his slaves emphasizes. And there is a sense in which, ultimately, Vonnegut can be no more freed from these his children than he can be from the parents he so constantly recalls. Trout embodies much of the father—even his shins, his feet, and his voice—but he is also father to Vonnegut, in part the obscure writer he once was, in part the man he might have become, and in part the often bemused but patiently cheerful person he remains. So, while Breakfast of Champions celebrates a birthday, discarding old trappings and offering new beginnings, the happy anniversary is not wholly joyous. It is, after all, his fiftieth. Vonnegut's last words might echo Trout's—"Make me young, make me young, make me young"—and the final portrait shows him with a tear in his eye. (pp. 168-69)

[Slapstick] is a view of life as being as his dying sister described it: "Slapstick." Given the conditions he [describes] of isolation, of inevitable death, of bargaining in good faith with a meaningless universe—one might choose another word: "Absurd." Except that Vonnegut's word typically emphasizes the comic (or comical) potentialities so often overlooked by the existentialists…. Yet just as the prologue, which reflects on many such occurences in Vonnegut's own life, does not seem depressed, so the novel's tone transcends the gloom inherent in much of its content. And, for the same reason. Vonnegut himself seems steadier, more composed, more at terms with life in this prologue than in those which immediately precede it. Likewise, his narrator in Slapstick, though wearied and in some senses disillusioned, seems calm and resigned.

In casting himself as Wilbur Swain and his sister as Eliza Swain, Vonnegut has made both "monsters." This may seem perverse or whimsical, yet remains characteristic of Vonnegut. He is consistently self-denigrating in his fiction and the prefaces. Some of the characters with whom he might be most nearly identified and some of the "heroes" of his fiction are abnormal physically or psychologically, and when he approaches self in portraying artists and writers he typically undercuts. One senses a degree of embarrassment here in a writer who nevertheless feels compelled to be direct and personal. It is as if he needs the protection of irony and whimsy after having come so close to the nerve. Usually the protection serves well, saving him in tricky spots from what might otherwise become sentimental self-pity, didacticism, or plain morbidity. In Slapstick the character of Wilbur Swain works effectively as such a mask, but more importantly helps to advance thematic content. Most notably, casting the young Swains as seven-foot freaks gives comically dramatic emphasis to the notions of "common decency" in human relations and "bargaining in good faith with destiny." (pp. 172-73)

Where the autobiography lies in all of this (and one should not take the novel as some kind of psychological roman à clef) perhaps only Vonnegut can answer. His sister, Alice, was tall, embarrassed by her height, and developed bad posture—all hyperbolically reproduced in Eliza. Vonnegut felt especially close to her [and] claims that she was the only person he had written for…. (p. 174)

[The] need for "family" becomes the major theme of the novel, expressed personally as part of what life feels like to Vonnegut, and more broadly as a universal human requirement. (p. 175)

[The] novel ends with affirmation in terms of its major theme. Caring relatives behave with decency, and the bargaining in good faith with destiny goes on. And this affirmation arises out of a view of life bleak enough to contradict any suggestions of bland optimism. The last words—"Das Ende"—also nod toward relatives: those Vonneguts who "were all cultivated and gentle and prosperous, and spoke German and English gracefully"….

This, then, is the slapstick of life as Vonnegut feels it. Much of that experience seems painful. Wilbur's pill-popping, his birthdays, his father-son relationships, his loss of a sister, all echo phases in the author's life. Often the comical coexists with the painful, as agility and intelligence are sorely tested. Like a Laurel and Hardy film, Vonnegut's fictional world is "funny and adorable" but also poignant…. [Vonnegut has said in an interview that] "People are too good for this world"…. For a moment this almost startles us, because although Vonnegut claims not to create villains or heroes, he portrays some rather nasty people and shows plenty of suffering caused by human action. Yet his prevailing attitude remains one of sympathy for the human lot. The destiny with which humans gamble does not always keep good faith; if gravity is not unpredictable, the weather certainly is. The best that humans can do is often not good enough, and Vonnegut breathes another "Hi ho," bespeaking a weary resignation but not, ultimately, rejection. He sees humans generally as limited in the same ways as himself, and that gives rise to one of the major strengths of Slapstick and of his other fiction: the ability to interconnect the intensely personal with the universally human. (pp. 183-84)