Comparing the Two Selections (Blog #3)

Breakfast of Champions, my second selection by Kurt Vonnegut, was written roughly 10 years after Sirens of Titan[1959], but Vonnegut's books still retain much of the same style and syntax of his early works.
And although the writing styles are similar, the books themselves seem worlds apart for a few reasons:

• Vonnegut chooses to write Breakfast in a narrator style like his other books, but he mixes in a prologue, written in an autobiographical way, and often inserts something about himself or an opinion of his into the book along way. This makes you think that what you are reading is meant specifically for you, and it draws the reader much closer to the book. "This book is my fiftieth-birthday present to myself. I feel as though I am crossing the spine of a roof-having ascended one slope"(3).
• The whole 'writing specifically to the reader' method ties into the next unique thing about Breakfast, which is that the book is written as though for someone(something) that is familiar with Earth, but not anything about Earth: Al throughout the book, Vonnegut stops his paragraph in the middle to explain something he just referenced, like what a cow was, the American National Anthem, what America is, etc. "Trout and Hoover were citizens of the United States of America, a country which was called America for short. This was their national anthem, which was pure balderdash, like so much they were expected to take seriously"(7).
• In most books you read, the plot is built up from the beginning until the climax, but Vonnegut chooses to throw away that idea by explaining the plot in the first few pages of the book. Now, you would think that this would ruin the book, but there is still so much to understand about the characters, the setting, and the lead-up to the big story event that you are kept drawn into this book about a Sci-Fi writer who meets a car dealer in Midland City. "This is a tale of a meeting of two lonesome, skinny, fairly old white men on a planet which was dying fast"(7).
  
• There is also the matter of Kilgore Trout, the widely-distributed, but not very well known science fiction writer, who is believed to be Kurt Vonnegut's alter ego. A good quarter of the book is just Vonnegut telling you about the books that Trout has written, and somehow tying them into Breakfast. The only reason that I mention this is because this is the first book where he decides to not use the same names for all of his characters, and actually branch out from his popular writing style.

And despite all of these differences, this book is still clearly a Vonnegut title, so the same cynical writing, great characters, and all-around weird writing are expected/delivered. Dwayne Hoover, the car salesman, is thought to be crazy, and is written that way, but it's implied that it's not him that is crazy, it's some other force controlling him. The things that makes him crazy are always referred to as 'Dwayne's Bad Chemicals', and every time he acts crazy, he is totally aware of it.