The thrust of Vonnegut's fiction has moved from detached, ironic observation to impassioned participation. His early works, Player Piano and The Sirens of Titan, were concerned with the external environment—the dangers of technology and the glorification of the machine. He also evinced a marked concern with the relationship between destiny and fate, but the detached tone of his novels made it difficult to penetrate the layers of ambivalence. In Mother Night, Vonnegut began to concern himself more with the internal state of consciousness and with the problem of schizophrenia, as well as with the epistomological question of what can be perceived as real and what is simply illusory. Cat's Cradle and God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater express Vonnegut's feelings about institutionalized religion, about the destructive nature of a social system that values money much more highly than love, and about the loneliness of the thousands of unloved that Eliot Rosewater wants to help but cannot without destroying himself. In Slaughterhouse-Five and in Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut began to speak much more confidently with his own voice about himself and his views of society; and he culminated Breakfast of Champions by cutting his ties to Kilgore Trout, his erstwhile spokesman. Perhaps Vonnegut had outgrown his idealistic and very naïve alter ego.
