Breakfast of Champions

Kurt Vonnegut · 1922–2007 · USA

Why it matters

Kilgore Trout, Vonnegut's hack alter ego, drives cross-country toward a reunion that convinces a Midwestern car dealer his free will is fiction, while Vonnegut himself steps into the book to set his own characters loose. Metafiction staged as a nervous breakdown, doodles included.

At a glance

Childlike line drawings and a fragmented structure ease a formally radical, self-aware novel.