Breakfast of Champions: Chapter 2 Summary & Analysis

Dwayne is a “widower” who lives alone in a fancy house in the wealthy part of town with his dog, Sparky. Dwayne has a “black servant named Lottie Davis,” and while he likes her just fine, he spends most of his time talking to Sparky. Dwayne’s talks with Sparky “go on unrevised,” so this is never an indication of his insanity to Lottie.

Kilgore has a parakeet named Bill, and like Dwayne, Kilgore spends most of his time talking to his pet. He tells Bill that the atmosphere will soon be “unbreathable,” and it will be the end of the world. “Any time now,” Kilgore tells Bill. “And high time, too.” To Kilgore, “humanity deserves to die horribly, since it has behaved so cruelly and wastefully on a planet so sweet.” 

Kilgore is in the habit of calling mirrors “leaks.” He pretends that mirrors are “holes between two universes,” and he warns small children not to get to close to them. “You wouldn’t want to wind up in the other universe, would you?” he asks them. Whenever someone says they must “take a leak,” Kilgore tells them: “Where I come from, that means you’re about to steal a mirror.” After Kilgore is dead, “everybody” will call mirrors leaks.

In 1972, when Kilgore meets Dwayne, Kilgore is living in a “basement apartment in Cohoes, New York.” He is in the business of aluminum storm windows, but he works as an installer and not a salesman because he doesn’t have any “charm.” Dwayne has charm but not Kilgore. “I can have oodles of charm,” Vonnegut says, “when I want to.”

Kilgore is the author of over one hundred novels and two thousand short stories, but decent publishers have never heard of him. He doesn’t make copies of his writing, and he sends his work off to publishers without a return address. Kilgore sends most of his work to “World Classics Library,” a publisher of “hard-core pornography.” They use his work to “give bulk to books and magazines of salacious pictures.” They pay him “doodley-squat.”

“World Classics Library” never tells Kilgore when or where his writing will be published, so he must search pornography stores to find them. Usually, the publisher changes the title, like “Pan Galactic Straw-boss” becomes “Mouth Crazy,” and illicit pictures accompany the text. Trout’s “most widely-distributed book,” Plague on Wheels, did not undergo a title change in publication, but Kilgore’s name is obscured by a banner that reads: “WIDE-OPEN BEAVERS INSIDE!” The pictures inside are of women with their “legs far apart.” The word “beaver” is “code” used by men to talk about a woman’s vagina. “A beaver,” Vonnegut writes, is “actually a large rodent.” He includes a drawing of a beaver as well as a crude drawing of a woman’s vagina for comparison. “This is where babies come from,” he says. 

Plague on Wheels is about a “dying planet” named Lingo-Three that is inhabited by American-made automobiles. The cars live on “fossil fuels” and can “reproduce.” Space aliens visit Lingo-Three because they hear that the planet’s atmosphere has been “destroyed” and they want to visit the planet before the automobiles become extinct. Kago, the leader of the aliens, can do nothing to help, but he promises to remember them. “You will be gone,” Kago tells the cars, “but not forgotten.” Kago indeed keeps their memory alive and tells the inhabitants of a planet named “Earth” all about them. Kago, however, doesn’t realize that Earthlings can be “easily felled by a single idea.” On Earth, there is “no immunity to cuckoo ideas.”