Slaughterhouse-Five from the start suggested the possibility that Vonnegut had written the crucial personal experiences out of his system, and I think that this is one reason we have all tended to wait with particular interest, and perhaps a little uncertainty, for what would subsequently come from him. In prefacing [Happy Birthday, Wanda June], Vonnegut declared that he was through with novels and with characters who were "spooks"…. The end appeared at hand, if one dared take the author seriously. In Breakfast of Champions he announced the discarding of old characters and themes, while also bringing certain other lines of development in his fiction to their seeming logical ends. With Vonnegut's observation that Breakfast of Champions spun off from Slaughterhouse-Five, one could imagine that it represented a final housecleaning. But then came Slapstick, a continuation which seems to promise more of the same. (pp. 151-52)
[Vonnegut's self consciousness] appears to have grown. That is suggested by his talk of abandoning the novel in his preface to Happy Birthday, Wanda June, and by his decrying the qualities of his books … in the introduction to Breakfast of Champions. The preface to Between Time and Timbuktu reveals more of the same: Vonnegut talking about the inadequacy of film since the author cannot place himself in the work…. And in prefacing Wampeters, Foma & Granfalloons he speaks of the problems of being a "guru" addressing college audiences, about critics writing of him as if he were already dead, and about "British critics" who find him sometimes too sentimental. More important than these prefatory musings, however, are the signs of such preoccupations in the content and style of the works.
