Coffee Breakfast

Cover of the first print

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is 1973 novel by Kurt Vonnegut. It has two main characters, Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover, who meet at the end of the novel and something terrible happens. The action is set in fictional city called Midland. The novel includes recurring autobiographical motifs.

Kilgore Trout is a science-fiction writer whose works have been published as 'filling' in pornographic magazines. He lives with his parrot. One day he receives an invitation to an art convention with $1000-check and decides to go.

Meanwhile, Dwayne Hoover, rich Pontiac dealer and businessman, starts getting crazy. His wife comitted suicide some time before after long history of mental illness. Dwayne has a secret affair with his secretary, Francine Pefko, and is a good employer. But eventually everything starts to collapse.

In the finale, Hoover reads one of Trout's books which is a fictional letter sent from the Creator to the only human who has free will. The book says that every human, except for the one who the letter was sent to, is a robot and acts as his program tells him to act. Hoover takes this as a fact and starts his rampage. In the first place he attacks his homosexual son, massacring his face with piano keyboard. After that he beats violently his lover Francine, bites one of Trout's fingers off and attacks other people who gather around.

Nobody gets killed, but all victims are taken to the hospital.

At the end, Kilgore Trouts meets the narrator, Kurt Vonnegut himself. They talk for a while. Vonnegut explains to Kilgore Trout that he was only writer's invention. After that he dematerialises and Trout desparately asks Vonnegut to give him back his youth.

In the continuum

In this novel a few recurring characters of Vonnegut's prose appear episodically: Kilgore Trout, Eliot Rosewater, Rabo Karabekian.

Eliot Rosewater is one of very few fans of Trout's novels. They don't meet during the action of the novel, but Rosewater is oftenly mentioned.

Rabo Karabekian appears in the finale, as a guest of art convention Trout has also been invited to.