[Breakfast of Champions] is almost a deliberate curiosity, an earnest attempt to play after getting Dresden out of the way. It's filled with Vonnegut's cartoon drawings of items mentioned in the text; it plays the whimsical game of pretending that we know nothing about life on earth … and it delivers many straight-faced criticisms of Life…. He indulges in some obligatory no-no's: he talks about Niggers, he draws a vagina, he gives penis measurements of most of the male characters (but fudges about his own). (p. 26)
Well, all this—and the funny names and the slapstick events—is less amusing than it ought to be. The characters are still stick figures, still listless playthings; but the "enormous forces" are now reduced to Vonnegut himself, who wanders through his novel like Ed Sullivan through reruns of his Sunday nights—creating characters, endowing them with nonce pasts and qualities, hurting or sparing them, and then dismissing them indifferently. We tend to share that indifference. We soon learn to read Breakfast by the line, or by the one-liner, hoping for a joke here and there and keeping an eye out for the novel's chief blessings, its summaries of Kilgore Trout's science fiction. The Vonnegut who appears is less charming than his earlier avatars: here he is represented as on the verge of a nervous breakdown, troubled by schizophrenia and his mother, and not much involved in the novel: "'This is a very bad book you're writing,' I said to myself…." It's not that bad; it's diverting … but it's pop, no snap or crackle…. Even simple communication requires the right kind of simple. At the University of Iowa [where he taught a writing workshop], one of Vonnegut's main themes was the "sense of wonder" needed by writers; here he describes—and draws—a rattlesnake with rattles and poison-filled fangs; then after a momentous pause he announces:
