Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions

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Recommended: Kurt Vonnegut's philosophy

Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions

Who would have ever thought the way a radioactive particle decays would relate to whether or not we have bad attitudes towards life? Who would have ever suspected that the structure of space-time would be so closely linked to whether or not we would marry rich wives? And who indeed would have ever expected that the properties of light might affect whether or not we go on homicidal rampages? Perhaps Kurt Vonnegut did. Could it be possible that a writer known more for his pictures of assholes than his knowledge of advanced physics actually centered some of the deepest concepts in his works on the philosophical implications of general relativity and quantum mechanics? Two of his greatest novels, Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, both seem to hint at the relationship between modern physics and an idea philosophers call determinism. Vonnegut readers might well scratch their heads and flip through their copies of these books, searching the stories of the fragmented life of a war veteran and the deranged antics of a mad car salesman for a chapter on the Schrödinger wave equation they may have skipped. I freely admit that their search will be in vain, and that no truly concrete proof exists that Vonnegut based the ideas in these books on the latest discoveries of science. But I also contend that the parallels between Vonnegut’s work and advanced physics are a little too perfect to be a series of very lucky accidents. From this perspective, it seems likely that Vonnegut used ideas based on physics to support the idea of determinism in Slaughterhouse-Five and destroy it in Breakfast of Champions.

But perhaps before arguing about the ways Von...

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...e and what he saw made him more optimistic. Or maybe it was all due to copious consumption of the “little pill[s]” he takes to “cheer up” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of… 4). Even Vonnegut might not know for certain. All that can be said with confidence is that Vonnegut’s idea of truth evolved between Slaughterhouse-Five and Breakfast of Champions, just like the theories and concepts of physics do even now. In the end, so too must all human knowledge die and be reborn. As Vonnegut might say (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse… 34), “So it goes.”

Works Cited

Rachels, James. Problems from Philosophy. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2005.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Dell Publishing, 1973.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Slaughterhouse-Five. New York: Dell Publishing, 1969.

Zukav, Gary. Dancing Wu-Li Masters. New York: William Morrow and Company, inc., 1979.

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