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THE ABSURDITY OF SUICIDE: THE EXISTENTIAL STRUGGLE EXPLORED BY VONNEGUT IN BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS
Authors: Deanna Rodriguez
Number of views: 704
From Cat’s Cradle to Breakfast of Champions, Kurt Vonnegut’s work is full of philosophical
musings that can be read as existentialism. One of the more obvious existential dilemmas Vonnegut
struggles with is the notion of suicide. Albert Camus in his collection of essays entitled The Myth of
Sisyphus and Other Essays explores the notion of the absurdity of suicide– absurdity being used in the
philosophical sense, meaning the conflict between the human tendency to seek inherent value and
meaning inlife and the human inability to find any,and on what leads a man to think about suicide and
ultimately how one can make the decision life is not worth living anymore. Camus explains what can spur
on suicidal thoughts as¬¬– “A world that can be explained even with bad reason is a familiar world. But,
on the other hand, man feels analien, a stranger. His exile is without remedy since he is deprivedof the
memory of a lost home or the hope of a promised land. Thisdivorce between man and this life, the actor
and his setting, isproperly the feeling of absurdity” (Camus 6). It’s a common trend in Vonnegut’s
writing, the loss of home as well as the hope of a promised land, or more particular in Vonnegut’s case,
the nostalgia of a better time and as well, the yearning for an Edenic existence. Vonnegut places so much
of himself into his writing, and he even goes so far as to insert himself as a character. Particularly in
Breakfast of Champions, he talks to himself as a character. It is through his writing that Vonnegut can
truly work out his existential dilemma, and it is seen most clearly in the novel Breakfast of Champions.
By looking at the solutions reached by not only Vonnegut himself, but also by the characters in the novel,
which are clearly presenting issues of mental anguish, it’s clear to see how Vonnegut is an absurd creator,
in the existential sense presented by Camus.