Vonnegut

7 Pages 1650 Words

Breakfast of Champions - Vonnegut’s Autobiographical Self, or Comic Schizophrenic Characters
Kurt Vonnegut has been through many difficult times in his life. He has lived through times in which he was completely isolated from the rest of his society, relationships within his family, and relationships outside of his family. Vonnegut places a great deal of stress on experiences from his life that caused depression. All of these separations were brought about by forces other than ones controllable by Vonnegut. These forces were caused by death or other natural forces. (Lundquist, p. 2) The characters in Vonnegut’s books experience these same feelings of isolation. Like in Vonnegut’s own life, the isolation is not by choice. Some characters are isolated from society, while others are isolated from relationships important to them. Vonnegut also seems to share tendencies of paranoid schizophrenia with some of his characters. They often feel as though they are the only people in the world that have the capability to make their own decisions. This is a common fantasy of patients with paranoid schizophrenia. (Lundquist, p. 56) Is Breakfast of Champions an autobiographical mental representation of Vonnegut, or is it simply a series of schizophrenic comic characters? This is what we shall explore in this essay.
At the age of fourteen, Vonnegut lost his mother to suicide. In May 1944, she poisoned herself. In Breakfast of Champions, Dwayne Hoover has a wife who commits suicide. Repeatedly, throughout the book, Vonnegut mentions Hoover’s wife who kills herself by drinking Dräno. “He even forgot that his wife Celia had committed suicide, for instance, by eating Dräno.” (p. 65) This suicide resembles Vonnegut’s own mother’s death by poisoning herself. He even acknowledges this fact: “And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Dräno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.�...