Gabriel Sees Dead People: How Deconstruction Illuminates James Joyce’s “The Dead”

The question of what happens to Gabriel Conroy during his epiphany in James Joyce’s “The Dead” is one that is difficult, some would say impossible, to answer conclusively; however, through deconstruction, the complexity of what Gabriel experiences during his epiphany is opened to much more profound levels. The intricacy of Gabriel’s character can be understood in terms of logocentrism. Understanding his existence as rooted in logocentrism, which through the events of the text is continually destabilized, allows the reader to gain a better understanding of what Gabriel undergoes during his epiphany. The epiphany ultimately allows the text to deconstruct the logocentrism of Gabriel’s worldview. He values superiority over inferiority, meaning over meaninglessness, and life over death, three logocentric binary oppositions. It is through the presence and deconstruction of these binaries that a deeper understanding of Joyce’s text and Gabriel’s epiphany can be achieved.

Binary oppositions are pairings of objects or concepts, which are seemingly mutually exclusive. In Western thought, one of the pair is privileged over the other; Jacques Derrida calls this privileging “logocentrism” (Of Grammatology), which was originally used to refer to the privilege of speech over writing. Jonathan Culler, in “Semiotics and Deconstruction,” offers a helpful definition for what it means to deconstruct logocentrism: “To deconstruct logocentrism is to show that what was taken to be the truth of the world or the ground of an enquiry is in fact a construct that has been imposed and which is contradicted by certain results of the enquiry it founds” (138). Deconstruction is a function of the text: something the text does to itself. In deconstructing binary oppositions, the opposition is not reversed. Norman Melchertt, in The Great Conversation, using the example of speech over writing, explains:

The claim is rather that the characteristics of what was held to be secondary and derivative are already, and necessarily, found in what was thought to be basic and primary. It is not, then, that the speech/writing dichotomy is simply overturned, so that it becomes writing/speech, with writing now in the primary spot, but that a deeper sense of “writing” is discovered that underwrites both terms. (707-708)

It is not that the texts points to inferiority, meaninglessness, or death as more important than their classical primaries. Rather, it points to that which has been assumed to be inherent in superiority involves inferiority, what has been assumed to make meaning primary could potentially make meaninglessness primary, and finally that death is inherent in life. Deconstruction merely destabilizes these oppositions.

My reading of “The Dead” does not attempt to unmask any ideologies associated in particular with James Joyce; rather, I will demonstrate how the text itself deconstructs the three logocentric binary oppositions mentioned above through a destabilization of Gabriel Conroy’s worldview and the climactic epiphany he experiences at the end of the story and thus provides a deeper understanding of what happens to Gabriel. In the introduction to Derrida, the editors of The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism point out that:

What these ‘undecidables’ [the terms used to describe deconstruction as well as the word ‘deconstruction’ itself] [. . .] have in common is their displacement of what is normally taken for granted as the ground rules for a reading. In that sense, the logics they make visible and functional are generalizible—but they are not logics, if logic is understood as something separable from the text and generalizable apart from it. They are threads in it. (1819; original emphasis)

It is possible, then, for a text, apart from the author’s intensions, to deconstruct logocentrism found within the text’s own characters. These terms are already found in the text. Since it is the text itself that performs the work of deconstruction, it must not be read that Gabriel himself is aware of deconstruction at work, even though it is his worldview that is affected by the text’s deconstruction and he experiences those effects on a profound level. Rather, the events of the story point to commonly held logocentric beliefs regarding privileging in binary oppositions and how those are destabilized through Gabriel’s exchanges with other characters. The destabilization of these oppositions and their ultimate deconstruction through Gabriel’s epiphany opens the meaning of the text to more insightful understanding. Deconstruction is a product of the text itself, not a conscious aim of the author or any of the story’s characters.

In superiority over inferiority, the superior is seen as privileged in strength, intelligence, and power (wealth and social status) whereas the inferior, servant, or slave is powerless in the these areas. However, the logocentric view ignores the power in numbers that inferiors hold. While it is not universally true or inevitable that inferiors will have uprisings or be able to recognize or acknowledge that power, it is not universally true that they will not. Furthermore, inferiors, particularly servants and slaves, always control and provide whatever commodity their superiors want, and if the inferior refuses that commodity, the superior is stripped of power.

Gabriel’s first interaction is with Lily, the caretaker’s daughter. She is someone he has known for years, yet because he is of a higher class, he feels he is superior. He pretends not to know her at all and treats her like a child, asking, “Do you still go to school” (Joyce 23)? Gabriel’s superiority over Lily exists in class distinction. His power over her in this specific instance comes from his perceived ability to treat her as a child: as less than he is. Her commodity here, in terms of her as inferior, is to provide an answer that will fit her role as the servant. She does this by politely answering him, even though his question is rude. He continues the insult further, teasing her about getting married soon. Her immediate and bitter retort takes Gabriel completely by surprise and he “color[s] as if he felt he had made a mistake” (23). Lily completely undercuts Gabriel’s assumed authority by refusing to play along. He tries to salvage what authority he thought he had by forcing money on her, calling it a Christmas gift. Lily, does not take it willingly, but “seeing he had gained the stairs,” (24) decides she has no choice but to accept it. Gabriel is unable to prove himself superior over her, thus the power associated with superiority in logocentrism is denied, and through the text the privilege is deconstructed. Gabriel experiences immediate discomfort and embarrassment as a result of the text’s deconstruction.

Superiority is also present in the next scene. Not only does Gabriel force his wife, Gretta, to wear goloshes, but while she is explaining what they are, his “admiring and happy eyes [are] wandering from her dress to her face and hair” (25). Gabriel’s objectification of his wife only begins here. The text subtly tells the reader that Gabriel is a man who must be in control. Gretta explains to his aunts, in this same scene, what he makes their children do: “He’s really an awful bother, what with green shades for Tom’s eyes at night and making him do the dumb-bells, and forcing Eva to eat the stirabout. The poor child! And she simply hates the sight of it!” (25). The text highlights Gabriel’s desire for superiority over others and makes the reader aware that it is not limited to house servants and his wife; he must control all that his children do as well. His children provide him superiority in their obedience. Even though they are forced, they still comply and are truly powerless to do anything about Gabriel’s demands, thus upholding the logocentric opposition. Gabriel, however, is not consciously aware that he privileges superiority, rather the text makes that clear through dialogue and descriptions such as this instance.

The way Western thought views meaning as dominant over what is meaningless is that an object or concept becomes meaningless only when meaning is removed from it. Therefore, in the logocentric view, meaninglessness is derivative of meaning. However, meaning can be achieved just as easily through the removal of meaninglessness from an object or concept. The two then become equal, but it is not that a “deeper sense” of meaninglessness is discovered as with superiority/inferiority or life/death. It may seem like the deconstruction of this opposition contradicts the concept that oppositions are not reversed because it is deconstructed through the reversal of the terms. However, through this reversal, the terms are equalized because what makes meaninglessness derivative is that meaning leaves it behind when meaning is removed. By reversing the terms, meaning becomes what is left when meaninglessness is removed.

In the scene following his exchange with Lily, meaning over meaninglessness is first introduced through Gabriel’s desire to impress. Gabriel isolates himself outside the drawing room door, listening to the guests dancing inside (24). Gabriel’s insecurity is further developed as he contemplates the speech he is to give before dinner. He decides not to quote the lines from Robert Browning for he feared they would be above the heads of his hearers [. . .] The indelicate clacking of the men’s heels and the shuffling of their soles reminded him that their grade of culture differed from his [. . .] They would think he was airing his superior education [. . .] He would fail with them just as he had with the girl. (24) This fear of failure demonstrates Gabriel’s desire for meaningfulness that runs continually through the narrative. However, it does not only stem from his interactions with and desire to impress and not be embarrassed in front of other characters when he is speaking to them: everyone must appreciate his entire outward appearance at all times. With this example, the “threads” (Leitch 1819) that these oppositions are become woven together within the text. The text brings to light Gabriel’s belief that he is superior to the other guests at the party. Gabriel, as an academic, believes that his education is part of what makes him superior to them. He does not want them to take that away from through a failure of his speech due to its superior academic quality. If they do not understand what he says during his speech, then it becomes meaningless, and the guests will resent him for his superior education rather than admire him.

The text, through Gabriel’s exchange with Molly Ivors, his academic equal, reveals what is truly important to him. She accuses him of being disloyal to Ireland. Gabriel, admittedly is “sick of [his] own country” (Joyce 32). He refuses Miss Ivors invitation to join her on a visit to the Aran Isles because he has “already arranged to go [. . .] for a cycling tour” in “France and Belgium [. . .] partly to keep in touch with the languages and partly for a change” (32). He is not concerned with his own country because, to him, it is meaningless. It does not serve the image he wants to project to others. Gabriel values the culture of the continent more than his own because it makes him feel superior, strengthening the meaning his life has through priveliging what he see as a superior culture. It frustrates him that no one else will recognize his value of continental culture as valid, an effect of deconstruction through the text at work, yet the only time he protests is in his outburst regarding how sick he is of Ireland. This allows an open door by which the text can easily deconstruct the oppositions at work. Gabriel’s worldview is made vulnerable because he is embarrassed by the reactions to his value of another culture over his own Irish heritage. He is frustrated that no one sees meaning in what he does, and because of that, he cannot feel the superiority he is used to having. The text demonstrates, especially in this instance, how superiority is valued not only through class and gender but culture as well. By the end of the narrative, the meaninglessness associated with his Irish culture will be removed and replaced with meaning thereby deconstructing the opposition.. The text prepares Gabriel’s worldview for deconstruction by providing a myriad of instances that hint at the oppositions and suggest that they will be destabilized in the end.

Life is privileged over death for a number of reasons. First, human beings, generally speaking, have no concrete knowledge of what happens after death. Death is a mystery whereas life is known. Furthermore, in death, one is seen as no longer active in life, no longer able to participate in what one did while alive. Death is part of the past, while the present and future belong to life. When this privilege is deconstructed, death is accepted as not just an inherent part of life, but as something with an active role in life, not life’s antithesis.

Prior to Gabriel’s dinner speech, Aunt Julia reminisces about Parkinson, who was “A beautiful pure sweet mellow English tenor” (41). It is this talk of dead singers that prompts Gabriel to mention something about death in his speech. He speaks of the past and says:
Those days might, without exaggeration, be called spacious days: and if they are gone beyond recall let us hope, at least that in gatherings such as this we shall still speak of them with pride and affection, still cherish in our hearts the memory of those dead and gone great ones whose fame the world will not willingly let die. (43) Gabriel’s assumption is that once someone dies, so does his or her memory. Only through fame can one’s memory live on because that fame, the important and significant achievements of that person deserve to live on in the hearts of humanity. He continues on, saying:

Our path through life is strewn with many such sad memories: and were we to brood upon them always we could not find the heart to go on bravely with our work among the living. We have all of us duties and living affections which claim, and rightly claim, our strenuous endeavours. Therefore, I will not linger on the past. I will not let any gloomy moralizing intrude upon us here to-night. (44)

The text, through Gabriel’s speech, gives a practical example of what the logocentric view of the opposition is: Dwelling on death will hinder the progress of the living. There is an irony in that death and what Gabriel calls “gloomy moralizing” does intrude upon him in the end.

The text presents this privileging of life over death as a part of Gabriel’s image that he wants to project outward in his insatiable thirst for meaning. He equates life with the present and the future, while death is part of the past. The text represents the logocentric notion through Gabriel putting on this front regarding death, yet throughout the night, he is surrounded by images of and conversation about death, though he does not realize it until his epiphany at the end. Both his mother and father are dead. His uncle, Pat, is dead. In his aunts’ home hang pictures of the dead: “the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet [. . .] and beside it was a picture of the two murdered princes in the Tower” (30). He listens to a conversation between Aunt Kate, Mr. Browne, and Mary Jane about monks who sleep in their coffins because “ ‘the coffin [. . .] is to remind them of their last end’” (42). The text provides a brief glimpse for the reader into what the deconstruction of life over death might look like. It is also possible that Gabriel desires escape from his own culture because he sees it as dead or dying as well. It is this separation of life from death, and Gabriel’s favoring of life over death that is deconstructed through his wife’s story. Both superiority/inferiority and meaning/meaninglessness are woven into the deconstruction of life/death and the catalyst by which the text deconstructs all three is the story of Michael Furey. The epiphany is what Gabriel experiences as a result of the text deconstructing his worldview.

Before Gretta tells the story of this childhood love, the text continues demonstrate logocentric superiority/inferiority as Gabriel not only objectifies his wife but fantasizes about completely and brutally dominating her. While he and Gretta make their way to their hotel room, “he long[s] to be alone with her” and imagines the scene when they will finally be alone in their hotel room and he can have her (52). His desire for her continues to rise throughout their cab ride, and he is “happy that she [is] his, proud of her grace and wifely carriage” (53). In Gabriel’s mind, Gretta belongs to him; because she is his wife, she is also his property and will do what he wants when he wants her to. He wants to get her into bed; he knows that he must woo her gently, but the impulses of his body are making it difficult. His body tells him to force her. Yet, he dismisses those feelings and speaks to her casually “in a false voice” (54) trying to build up the nerve to begin. He decides “he must see some ardour in her eyes first” yet “[h]e long[s] to be superior of her strange mood” (54). This desire for superiority over Gretta builds in Gabriel until “a fever of rage and desire” consumes him and “he long[s] to cry to her from his soul, to crush her body against his, to overmaster her” (54). These brutal feelings of superiority are completely destabilized when Gretta reveals she is not thinking about him at all. She is “thinking about that song, The Lass of Aughrim” (55) and her past love, Michael Furey.

Gretta’s story about this childhood love brings Gabriel’s selfishness to the full attention of the reader. The text destabilizes the opposition much in the same way it does with Lily. Because sexual tension based on a desire to fulfill his role as Gretta’s superior is undercut, he, as with Lily, experiences frustration, then flusters and quickly attempts to regain control as a result of this destabilization. He mocks, “O then, you were in love with him? [. . .] Perhaps that was why you wanted to go to Galway with that Ivors girl?” (56), completely ignoring his wife’s feelings, vexed in his awareness that he has lost his power over her to someone from her past. Because of his logocentric worldview, Gabriel cannot comprehend why Gretta would have such strong emotion towards a person who is no longer a part of her life and because the text has deconstructed this worldview, Gabriel experiences a shattering of everything he has known. Michael Furey is part of the past, and although Gabriel does not yet know that Michael Furey is dead or why he died, people of the past have no place in the present except as a way for Gabriel to bring more meaning to his own life. The story of Michael Furey and Gabriel’s epiphany that follows involves all three binary oppositions: The text removes power from Gabriel as superior because Gretta will not give him what he wants; it removes the meaninglessness Gabriel associated with Western Ireland and replaces it with meaning, thereby undermining the privilege meaning had over meaninglessness; finally, it shows Gabriel the power someone in death can have over anyone living and the inevitability of death in life.

When Gabriel finally finds out how Michael Furey died, he, at first, still tries to deny the connection that life and death share and writes off Gretta’s experience as nothing important. “So she had had that romance in her life: a man had died for her sake,” Gabriel thinks, and tries to convince himself that “it hardly pained him now to think how poor a part he, her husband, had played in her life” (58), even though it really does pain him. It is at this moment that the experiences of the night begin to culminate, allowing the text to deconstruct the logocentrism of Gabriel’s beliefs. What Gabriel experiences as a result of this deconstruction is his world falling apart around him. Logocentrism regarding superiority has been deconstructed three times in the text: by Lily, Miss Ivors, and now by Gretta. Gretta’s focus on Michael Furey rather than Gabriel has demonstrated equality in power that the supposed inferior can have. Meaning/meaninglessness is deconstructed in that Gabriel now knows “[t]he time had come for him to set out on his journey westward’ (59)—his journey to West Ireland with Gretta. West Ireland, during his exchange with Miss Ivors, is nothing more than a meaningless, dead culture and language to him. Meaninglessness regarding the West has been removed by the text through the epiphany and replaced with meaning. It is meaningful to him because Gabriel realizes if he is to be happy—to see Gretta happy—he must travel west with her. Death too has found meaning whereas before it was meaningless to Gabriel. Through these, meaning is left when meaninglessness is removed, thus deconstructing what was thought to be primary.

Finally, the text deconstructs life over death. Gabriel begins to think of all the people whom he knows now—who are alive—but who will someday succumb to death. He imagines Aunt Kate and himself mourning the death of Aunt Julia. Suddenly, “[o]ne by one they were all becoming shades” (58), and Gabriel realizes that everyone he knows, including himself, will someday die. He also sees how deep an impact Michael Furey’s death has had on Gretta: “He had never felt like that himself towards any woman, but he knew that such a feeling must be love” (59). He would never have thought someone in death could have such power on the living. The story has not only affected Gretta deeply, but now Gabriel as well, causing him to reevaluate what he sees as important. Gabriel lies in bed, watching the snow fall “upon all the living and the dead” (59), equalizing both and finally deconstructing the most prevalent opposition in the narrative.

The deconstruction of logocentrism in Gabriel’s worldview through the text provides a deeper look into what actually occurs during his epiphany. Rather than just a realization regarding his shortcomings as a man, academic, and husband, the very root of his person, the basis for all his behavior and belief, is completely destabilized during his epiphany through deconstruction of the text and he experiences the ruination of his being. Describing the epiphany in this way provides a clearer possible answer for the question of what actually happens to Gabriel. If the text has destabilized what made Gabriel who he was throughout the story, someone who based everything on logocentrism as demonstrated through the text, then Gabriel’s epiphany has indeed transformed him.

Works Cited

Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” Poetics Today 1.1/2 Special Issue:
Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn 1979): 137-41.

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: The Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1997.

Joyce, James. “The Dead.” The Dead: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Daniel R.
Schwarz. New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 1994.

Leitch, Vincent B., ed. “Jacques Derrida: 1930-2004.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and
Criticism. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2001.

Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: Volume II: Decartes through Derrida and Quine.
4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

The Cash Value of Pragmatism and a Journey to the Limits of Language in Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions

Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It’s hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It’s round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you’ve got to be kind. – God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.

Richard Todd, in his 1973 review of Breakfast of Champions, which appeared in The Atlantic, refers to the “banality, the Kiwanian subtlety of [its] social criticisms” (106). A 1974 review appearing in Newsweek spoke at length of Kurt Vonnegut’s “gratuitous digressions” within the novel (114). Earl Rovit, in a 1974 article entitled “Some Shapes in Recent American Fiction,” mocks Breakfast of Champions, claiming that all anyone needs to write fashionable fiction is “sufficient stylistic verse and a typewriter that skips a little” (543). This certainly must have saddened Vonnegut to some extent. Not because his work was trashed—he probably could have cared less about what critics thought. But those critics missed the point. He had to have shed tears inside, maybe a little, just as his narrator does for Kilgore Trout at the end of Breakfast of Champions: They had an opportunity to understand, to help turn things around, and they missed it. Throughout his work, to those who took the opportunity to understand, one thing is clear: Kurt Vonnegut has a heart for the human race. No example is more prevailing in this respect than Breakfast of Champions.

Unfortunately, not only has Breakfast of Champions been misunderstood by critics, but by scholars as well. Most scholarship about the novel constantly refers to Vonnegut as the narrator. The first thing that must be established is that the narrator is not Vonnegut. Normally, a discussion of this distinction would not be necessary, even elementary, but because of the vast number of misreadings, it is necessary. The author/narrator distinction becomes confusing with many of Vonnegut’s texts, particularly this novel, because the narrator claims to be the author of the story. Yes, Vonnegut was unhappy and tentative about finishing Breakfast of Champions; the narrator also expresses his dissatisfaction with the book. Yes, there are obvious parallels between the lives of both the narrator and Vonnegut: Both were approaching their fiftieth birthdays during the writing of the novel; both of their mothers committed suicide; both have strong opinions about the state of humanity. Yet, the novel must be read the same way one reads any novel with a first person narrator.

Vonnegut’s narrator has a name: Philboyd Studge (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 6). This is only mentioned once, at the end of the preface as a signature. The confusion arises because Philboyd Studge references someone named in the epigraph, leading the reader to wrongly believe, right from the beginning, that the preface is the voice of the author, not the narrator. It is Studge’s narration, however, that makes up the preface. This is made even more confusing, because Studge, as a self-conscious narrator, makes reference to the actual authoring of the book by his hand, referring to himself as “the author” and “a novelist” (224, 299) further blurring the line between self-conscious narrator and author for many critics. In the preface to his collection of essays, Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons, Vonnegut calls himself “a work of fiction” (xxi). The self-conscious narrator in Breakfast can be read as a fictionalized version of Vonnegut, but his name is Philboyd Studge, as indicated at the end of the preface. Again, in the preface to his collection of essays, Vonnegut asserts that “works of the imagination themselves have the power to create” (Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons xxvi). Based on Vonnegut’s own assertion, it makes the most sense to read the narrator as a fictional character who creates the story but is not the author himself.

Vonnegut leaves the reader multiple clues that the narrator is not actually himself. The first, of course, is the narrator’s name, which critics either completely ignore or write off as the use of a ridiculous pen name. But there is further evidence. The narrator, toward the end of the novel, has entered his own story and demonstrates his power as creator of the story, contributing heavily to the author/narrator confusion. But the narrator also mentions he has a ludicrous physical attribute: his “penis [is] three inches long and five inches in diameter” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 292). The dimensions of his anatomy are not only ridiculous but impossible, pointing to the narrator being separate from the real Kurt Vonnegut. As Loree Rackstraw, a student of Vonnegut’s at he Iowa Writer’s Workshop, states in one of her many essays on Vonnegut’s work, “The writer may invent a story as a way of looking at the world [. . .] [I]maginative literature distills the experience of a culture into images that can shape its identity and transform its future” (51). Vonnegut uses Philboyd Studge to do exactly this.

One of Studge’s primary aims is to make the reader aware of the social construction of American culture and the impact it has had on humanity. The culture of Midland City, its people, its values, and the events that befall it throughout the course of the novel suggest the world is “[a] collaboration between reality and social construction” (Rackshaw 59). It is this concept of social construction that the narrator is most concerned with. We live in a reality which we have both control and yet no control of at the same time. This point is made throughout Breakfast in a variety of instances, particularly through Studge’s drawings and Studge entering the text itself as a character. Through these devices, the narrator attempts to describe the problem of language and how American culture’s pragmatic use of language is not only devaluing human life, but it is bringing humanity to the brink of disaster. Studge uses the semiotic nature of language to defamiliarize the American audience with its own pragmatic interpretations of language and thus encourage a rethinking of American reality.

When I use the term pragmatism, I am referring strictly to it as a philosophical school. H. Heath Bawdin, in his article “What is Pragmatism?” gives a helpful definition, particularly in dealing with Breakfast. Bawdin states that in pragmatism:

The test of truth is utility: it's true if it works. Hence the final philosophic wisdom: if you can't have what you want, don't want it. [. . .] The universe ultimately is a joint-stock affair: we participate in the evolution of reality. Our action is a real factor in the course of events. In the search for truth, we must run the risk of error. Lies are false only if they are found out: a perfectly successful lie would be tantamount to absolute truth. We must 'will to believe.' (421)

Pragmatism’s concern with the cash value of language, the “utility” (421) of truth, must be understood in order to grasp what Vonnegut’s text accomplishes. The idea that one constructs reality based on the meaning of language that has the highest value to the individual or culture is what Studge seeks to defamiliarize: We have discontinued our participation in “the evolution of reality” (421). America has settled on what it deems are the most valuable truths. In a sense, Studge’s defamiliarization questions the cash value of pragmatism itself. Semiotics is important to pragmatic thinking because pragmatism recognizes a certain relativity regarding language. There is no one, true definition afforded to any word or concept. A definition becomes true when it holds the most value for the person or culture that perceives that truth. Bawdin even points out that what is true could actually just be “successful lies” (421). Studge is tired of lies. It is these highest valued signifieds that Studge defamiliarizes beginning with the very first pages of the novel. Studge embarks with reader on a journey to the limits of our understanding regarding language.

The act of describing the limits of language, however, is inherently paradoxical. Studge must use language to describe its limits. The Swiss linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, pointed out at the turn of the 20th century that words are defined not by the specific things they refer to, but by all the objects they do not signify. Semiotics, especially the use of signifiers and their assumed signifieds, is central to Breakfast of Champions. The Saussurean concept of language as arbitrary is also central. If language itself, the actual system of sounds (according to Sassure), is arbitrary and “meanings float free of the world we normally think they’re anchored to” (Melchert 706), then Studge has ample ground to stand on in defamiliarizing these pragmatic definitions of standard and revered American symbols. But Saussure’s theory is problematic for more contemporary philosophers, primarily Derrida, because Saussure

specified that sound itself does not belong to the linguistic system, and though he has used the example of writing to illustrate the nature of linguistic units, he adamantly denies that writing is an object of linguistic enquiry ("spoken forms alone constitute its object") and treats writing as a parasitic form, the representation of a representation. (Culler 139)

Jacques Derrida’s continuation of Saussure in order to overturn Western binary oppositions is important because Saussare’s principle of difference, according to Derrida, “affects the totality of the sign, that is the sign as both signified and signifier” (10). Writing is a part of this system, so it cannot be ignored or considered dead. This is important to what Studge is trying to accomplish, first and foremost because Breakfast of Champions is a written text, but also because Studge not only examines spoken language, but written as well. Our pragmatic culture has put certain meanings and values to words and concepts, which have, in Studge’s view, brought about a steady decline in morality and are leading humanity to its end. The events of the novel take place “on a planet which [is] dying fast” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 7). Studge wants to show the reader why it is dying.
It is vital to note that Vonnegut was one of the first American authors to attempt to use language to explain the paradoxical and semiotic nature of language in his writing. Rackstraw points out that:

While an emphasis upon the artifice of language and life is now an important focus in contemporary literary criticism, it was not in academic vogue in American universities when Vonnegut was making his way into literary history [. . .] Vonnegut was one of the first American writers to make explicit through his self-reflective fiction the irony that he was using language to explore the curious and powerful and sometimes even dangerous nature of language itself. (53)

Vonnegut’s narrator not only explores the nature of language in Breakfast but actually demonstrates what happens when people become trapped by it.

What new understanding should readers garner from a demolition of their most revered symbols? – a question that doubtless many have asked of Vonnegut’s work. The understanding is not that of a new definition for these symbols, but rather an understanding that what they symbolize is not absolute. He is questioning them as “successful lies” (Bawdin 421). In Studge’s view, America has been based on these lies, products of Pragmatism, and they will bring about its demise if left ignored. Bill Gholson points out that “the self is never disembodied from the community, the history, and the discourses of which it is a part” (135). This is true of the narrator. In the first few pages of the novel, Studge does not try to hide his contempt for these symbols of his country’s history and the discourse it is based on. He begins with “The Star-Spangled Banner,” calling it “pure balderdash,” and “gibberish sprinkled with question marks” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 8). He continues on to the Flag and then to the Eye of Providence, which appears on the back of one dollar bills, stating, “Not even the President of the United States Knew what that was all about. It was as though the country were saying to its citizens, “In nonsense is strength” (9). The narrator explicitly states his purpose and feelings about these sacred American symbols and their pragmatic value: They are all utter nonsense. In these instances, it is very clear how Vonnegut “states matters with a painful simplicity,” so that the reader will “see freshly what they too often dismiss as the overly familiar” (Klinkowitz 106). Studge begins with the most familiar, important symbols to indicate just how serious he is. These irreverent commentaries on familiar, sacred symbols are meant to jolt and awaken the reader. They are meant to anger, to frustrate, but also to put the reader in a position where he or she may be able to grasp the rest of Studge’s lesson: If these most revered symbols of America and the pragmatic value placed on them can be seen as utter nonsense based on the semiotic nature of language, what else could I be missing?

The narrator not only attacks American symbols, but history itself in order to achieve the same effect. The first symbols are written off as harmless nonsense, whereas symbols that are supposedly part of American history such as the date 1492 are considered, “evil, since [they] concealed great crimes” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 10). He includes a visual representation of how the date would be written on the board, first to remind the reader of how “teachers of children in the United States of America wrote this date on blackboards again and again, and asked the children to memorize it with pride and joy” (10), but also to remind the reader that those numbers in that order are just that: numbers. They are given a value because they represent a year. That year symbolizes something important to America. The reader is given a short history lesson that is very different from what was being taught in history classes across the country. The narrator reminds the reader: “The teachers told the children that this was when their continent was discovered by human beings. Actually, millions of human beings were already living full and imaginative lives on the continent in 1492” (10). This is a fact that all Americans are already familiar with, yet most do not realize the implications. The notion that Europeans discovered this land and rightfully settled it should seem outrageous. Yet it isn’t. It is far from outrageous to the majority of Americans. 1492 is meant to symbolize a major turning point, the biggest turning point in human history. Studge then lets the reader know that it “was simply the year in which sea pirates began to cheat and rob and kill” (10). As bluntly as possible, the narrator dismisses the pragmatic signified meaning of 1492.

Similarly, he calls the torch held by The Statue of Liberty which is supposed to be “a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere” a “sort of ice-cream cone on fire” (10). He again includes his own visual representation of this image. The drawing itself does not have any meaning attributed to it. It is separated from the statue and reduced to the status of a fiery ice-cream cone, again to allow the reader to rethink the overly familiar. The irony of this beacon of freedom juxtaposed with the truth that “the sea pirates who had the most to do with the creation of the new government owned human slaves. They used human beings for machinery” (11) makes it impossible for the hypocrisy of these symbols to be ignored.

The narrator moves on from these symbols into the plot of the novel in the next chapter: a plot that can be summarized in one sentence. The novel is about the events leading up to a meeting between Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover, and their creator, Studge, who narrates their story. Dwayne is a man who’s “body was manufacturing certain chemicals which unbalanced his mind,” but he “needed some bad ideas, too, so that his craziness could have shape and direction” (13-14). Trout delivers these ideas to Dwayne in the form of a novel that tells Dwayne everyone on Earth but him is a robot. The narrator tells us that both Kilgore Trout and Dwayne Hoover are his literary creation, and he has come into his own story to “watch a confrontation between two human beings [he] had created” (197). This concept of “bad ideas” is central to the plot and becomes the target of the narrator’s overturning of American pragmatism through defamiliarization, as seen with America’s sacred symbols. Trout is the harbinger of bad ideas, but the reader is told right at the beginning that Trout fought inexorably against bad ideas based on the drawing of Trout’s tombstone, which reads: “WE ARE HEALTHY ONLY TO THE EXTENT THAT OUR IDEAS ARE HUMANE” (16). This is the mantra that is repeated subtly throughout the events of the novel. The plot is deceptively simple. Oversimplification is being used again, on the scale of the entire book, to draw the reader’s attention to what is being achieved through it.

Studge explains that Kilgore Trout can only publish his writing in porno magazines. He tells the reader that Trout’s name and the title of his “most widely-distributed book” has been “obliterated” by a “lurid banner which made this promise: Wide-open Beavers Inside!” (22). The crude banner is written out in felt-tip pen, and the word “Beavers” is underlined twice. This is the first instance where Studge makes reference to the semiotic nature of individual words and the way it is used pragmatically. He describes the magazine banner thus: “A wide-open beaver was a photograph of a woman not wearing underpants, and with her legs far apart, so that the mouth of her vagina could be seen” (22). He then explains how that particular use of the word developed. Yet, he does not use complex, sociological concepts or terminology to explain it; he simply tells how news photographers “needed a code word to yell to other newsmen and friendly policemen and firemen and so on, to let them know what could be seen, in case they wanted to see it. And the word was this: ‘Beaver!’” (22). The redefinition of an existing word to fit a more valuable meaning is at the core of American pragmatism. The word “Beaver” is more valuable to these men when it refers to a vagina. Thus beaver defined as vagina becomes true. This exposition is followed immediately by a description of the animal. Then a drawing of the animal. Just to be clear, the narrator finally draws a crude representation of a vagina, saying before it “The sort of beaver which excited news photographers so much looked like this:” and after it, “This was where babies came from” (23). The narrator leads the reader through a journey from beavers to babies. The reader is forced to consider the various meanings of this one word and all the possible objects it can refer to, thus Studge defamiliarizes the term. The use of such a vulgarity is then connected to the giving of life and the innocence of babies. “Beaver” is a pornographic term, arising out of a pragmatic need, used to refer to the female anatomy that produces babies. It is also a woodland animal. Once confronted with these simplified connections, the reader should at once see how the pragmatic need has manipulated language into something preposterous.

The subtitle of the novel, “Goodbye, Blue Monday,” is used in a similar demonstration. The motto of “The Midland City Ordinance Company” is “GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY” (42). The only reason the reader hears about this company is because Studge is explaining how Dwayne purchased his car dealership: through a loan which he got by putting up stock he owned in the company as collateral (42). After giving the reader the company motto, a seemingly useless piece of information, Studge tells the reader that Harry LeSabre, Dwayne’s sales manager, served in the Army Air Corps and once “got to paint a message on a five-hundred-pound bomb which was going to be dropped on Hamburg, Germany” (43). The narrator gives the reader one of his now expected and familiar drawings; it is of a bomb and on it is written, “GOODBYE, BLUE MONDAY” (43). This short exposition is easily overlooked because none of the information is immediately pertinent to the actual plot. However, there is a profound irony here. In the context of a company motto, Goodbye, Blue Monday is cheerful, hopeful. It is a declaration of happiness: Our products make your life easier. The context of the motto is given later on in the novel with an explanation of an advertisement for the Robo-Magic Corporation, which became The Midland City Ordinance Company. The ad reads: “Off to the bridge club while my Robo-Magic does the wash! Goodbye, Blue Monday!” (250). There is hope for a better life imbedded in the motto.

In the context of the bomb, it is a joke, a sad irony. There is a message of hope painted on the side of a weapon meant to destroy human life. The bomb represents the opposite of what the motto does. The narrator demonstrates that it is that simple to change the meaning of language. Simply paint the words somewhere they don’t belong. The phrase itself doesn’t carry any meaning outside of a context. Outside the context of a motto regarding household chores, the words mean nothing together. They take on meaning once they are placed within a context. Here, a pragmatic conception of language works to its fullest because the words truly have no value until put into what ever context makes them most valuable.

The irony of this odd section goes much deeper than the motto and its placement on a bomb. It is no coincidence that Harry LeSabre is the one who painted the motto on the bomb, though the narrator makes no mention of it being anything at all. He simply tells the reader the facts with no further explanation. As far as the reader knows, neither character is aware of the coincidence either. But immediately following this section, Dwayne drives Harry into a deep depression. There is a series of two coincidences, one perpetrated by Harry, one by Dwayne. Harry makes the mistake of speaking about adoption—something he and his wife considered. He does not know that Dwayne was adopted, and Dwayne doesn’t tell him. It remains an unspoken coincidence, just as the motto is unknown. Dwayne explodes and tells Harry he should “ ‘burn up [his] fucking wardrobe’ ” because his clothes are boring (48). Dwayne rants on and on, noting the coincidence between Harry’s last name and a Buick model by the same name. The narrator states that Harry “might have weathered all this with only minor damage, if only Harry hadn’t been a secret transvestite [. . .] Harry had to suspect that his secret was out” (48). In this instance, Dwayne is unaware of the coincidence and the effect his words cause. This example demonstrates, on a much more practical level, the power of words in context. Neither Harry nor Dwayne is aware of the reason behind the effect their words have on the other.

The visual representation of language is examined again when Kilgore Trout, trying to make his way to Midland City, hitches a ride with a trucker. The narrator provides a drawing of the truck: A sixteen wheeler with the word “PYRAMID” painted across the entire side of it. Studge calls it “a message written on the side [. . .] in bright orange letters which were eight feet high” and tells the reader that “Trout wondered what a child who was just learning to read would make of a message like that. The child would suppose that the message was terribly important, since somebody had gone to the trouble of writing it in letters so big” (92). This instance is similar to Harry LeSabre’s bomb message in that it is a word taken out of context, and additionally, its visual representation is called into question. Trout senses the word becomes more important, more valuable, since it is painted larger, yet the actual letters have not changed.

The word becomes the topic of conversation as Kilgore Trout makes his way to Midland City with the truck driver. The driver tells Trout about his brother-in-law who is “President of the Pyramid Trucking Company” (111). Trout, the only one in the novel who somehow understands what the narrator has been demonstrating about language, asks:

Why did he name his company Pyramid? [. . .] I mean—this thing can go a hundred miles an hour, if it has to. It’s fast and useful and unornamental. It’s as up-to-date as a rocket ship. I never saw anything that was less like a pyramid than this truck. [. . .] Why would anybody in the business of high speed transportation name his business and his trucks after buildings which haven’t moved an eighth of an inch since Christ was born? (111-12)

The narrator repeats what he did previously with the word “Beaver.” He draws a picture of an Egyptian pyramid and explains what they are, once again calling the reader to question the arbitrary nature of language and the way pragmatism has altered its meaning according to utility. Yet, Studge adds a new element this time. He tells the reader that “the driver’s answer was prompt. It was peevish, too, as though he thought Trout was stupid to have to ask a question like that. ‘He liked the sound of it [. . .] Don’t you like the sound of it?’” (112). This question of sound is an important one because the only reason the driver can give for attributing new meaning to this word is its sound. This type of pragmatism is the most outrageous because based on the truck driver’s logic, any word could be used in any application simply based on how it sounds.

Trout makes the mistake of asking the same question about the fire extinguisher in a Ford Galaxie which he becomes a passenger in after the truck driver has had enough of him. The narrator gives a visual representation, showing that the word “Excelsior” is written on the extinguisher (176). The narrator explains that, “As far as Trout knew, this word meant higher in a dead language. It was also a thing a fictitious mountain climber in a famous poem kept yelling as he disappeared into a blizzard above. And it was also the trade name for wood shavings which were used to protect fragile objects inside packages” (176). The narrator takes the sound of language one step further with this example. Trout again asks, “ ‘Why would anybody name a fire extinguisher Excelsior?’” and again receives the reply, “ ‘Somebody must have liked the sound of it’” (177). It is important that the word in this case is dead in its original usage. It then has four meanings attributed to it: one original definition, now dead; two completely different uses based on arbitrary changes; and one again based on how the word sounds. In pragmatic terms, the actual definition of the word has no utility because it is from a dead language. This demonstrates that not only the sound of a word can cause a completely arbitrary meaning: the death of a word or language can affect arbitrary usage as well.

The number of examples regarding arbitrary language and its pragmatic usage in the novel is extensive, but they begin to culminate and become clear in purpose as Studge moves toward the climax. The first event in this culmination is entrance of the narrator himself into the novel. This begins a view of language much larger than single word evaluation. The text points to itself as invention. The narrator flaunts his ability to create; he reminds the reader that Dwayne and Kilgore are “two human beings [he] created” (197). When speaking about Wayne Hoobler he announces that he has “created all Wayne’s misery to date, [he] could kill him or make him a millionaire or send him back to prison or do whatever he damn pleased with Wayne” (197). Studge flexes this creative power to demonstrate his control of language as a whole. He has invented and created lives and he can do whatever he pleases with them. The narrator demonstrates for the reader, at this point, the highest level of pragmatism: the construction of reality. If pragmatism is the “utility” of truth (Bawdin 421), then whatever definitions hold the most value become true. Studge has already pointed out some of the ways in which words have had new definitions attached to them based solely on utility. Using this definition of pragmatism and the examples Studge has given about words and their pragmatic redefinition based on need, context, and sound, a complete construction of reality would be entirely possible for anyone. The narrator has temporarily deceived the reader and, ironically, himself into believing that human beings have complete control over language, when the exact opposite is true.

On a simple level, within the plot of the story, language becomes master over Dwayne Hoover. He is trapped by language in multiple ways. He is, first and foremost, a character in a novel created by the narrator, and although the narrator recognizes eventually that his creations themselves have the ability to create, Dwayne never recognizes that. Even the short bit of information about his real parents help to define a person born under the influence and control of language, yet completely unaware of it. His mother wrote poetry, and his father put it in print. Language finally exerts complete control over Dwayne when he reads a novel by Kilgore Trout titled Now It Can Be Told which is written in the second person and tells Dwayne that every being on Earth is a robot but him. He believes it wholeheartedly. Trout’s novel becomes true to Dwayne because it has value to him. It ignites his “bad chemicals” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 14). To the reader, Trout’s book is clearly fiction; it is clearly nonsense. Pragmatism, however, evaluates Dwayne’s belief in Trout’s novel as justified. It is a “successful lie” (Bawdin 421). A parallel is then drawn between the nonsense of Trout’s novel and what the narrator defamiliarizes and overturns as nonsense at the beginning of the novel: the sacred American symbols. The narrator’s point is well taken—Americans have been and still are trapped by language just as ridiculous, just as false as what Dwayne has been trapped by. Dwayne’s bad chemicals finally have the bad ideas they need to make Dwayne lose his mind. The implication is that some of America’s bad ideas have done the same to other Americans full of bad chemicals.

On a much more complex level, Studge realizes that his own creation, his own language construction, is able to affect him. The paradox is that the narrator announces it by telling the reader: “And now comes the spiritual climax of this book, for it is at this point that I, the author, am suddenly transformed by what I have done so far. This is why I had gone to Midland City: to be born again” (224). This spiritual climax is ignited by the words of the artist Rabo Karabekian who, speaking of a Midland City swimmer, says, “What kind of man would turn his daughter into an outboard motor” (224)? The narrator goes through a myriad of realizations about greed and fear and finally tells the reader:

I [have] come to my own conclusion that there [is] nothing sacred about myself or about any human being, that we [are] all machines, doomed to collide and collide and collide. For want of anything better to do, we became fans of collisions. Sometimes I wrote well about collisions, which meant I was a writing machine in good repair. Sometimes I wrote badly, which meant I was a writing machine in bad repair. I no more harbored sacredness than did a Pontiac, a mousetrap, or a South Bend Lathe. (225)

The narrator’s climactic, profound statement regarding the nature of humanity is delivered to him through a character that he created. Rather than the narrator simply explaining this to the reader with no context within the novel, he discovers the truth with the reader. Vonnegut has already said that “works of the imagination themselves have the power to create” (Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons xxvi). His narrator’s constructed reality is altered and affected by itself, demonstrating that he doesn’t have control over what was supposed to be his construction.

The narrator’s conclusion itself is important as well. He essentially concludes and sums up exactly what has happened to him. He, along with the rest of humanity, is a machine, ultimately powerless to control his reality, though he has existed under the impression that he has been in control. This brings him to the conclusion that he is no more sacred than any other object described by language. He, too, is trapped by language. Yet, unlike Dwayne, the reader is lead to believe Philboyd Studge is immediately and consciously recognizing this. That is why Dwayne goes crazy, and Studge does not. The recognition that humans are powerless under the influence of language is important because it negates the power that pragmatism promises. The utilitarian value assigned to any particular definition is ultimately worthless because we do not control language, it controls us. Therefore to hold to “truths” based on lies because they hold a significant value does not make sense. The control of reality through construction is only perceived control. If this lack of control is not recognized, then language becomes a trap just as it does for Dwayne. Revisiting the overturning of American symbols is important. The narrator, through this epiphany, subtly suggests that there might be a lot less hate, destruction of human life and bigotry if the power of language and its control is recognized.

Studge is attacked by his own constructions twice in the novel. During the description of Dwayne’s rampage, the narrator says that he “came out of the riot with a broken watch crystal and what turned out later to be a broken toe. Somebody jumped backwards to get out of Dwayne’s way. He broke my watch crystal, even though I had created him, and he broke my toe” (Breakfast of Champions 282). Studge’s own language construction has moved beyond affecting his own thinking to physical harm. That language can affect ideas is easily accepted: even the reader who is outside the text of the novel can be affected by what its language says. The text may also affect a reader physically, if the reader is brought to tears or the language is comical, yet physical harm such as a broken toe or watch cannot happen to the reader just by reading a text. We are not in the text, however, the way the narrator is. He is inside the text, and the text is his own creation. The power of language is strong enough to harm him physically because he is trapped by it.

The second time, Studge is attacked as he waits for Kilgore Trout with the news that Trout is being set free. He tells the reader:

I saw Kazak out of the corner of my right eye. [. . .] He was floating toward me like a zeppelin, hanging lazily in air. My eyes told my mind about him. My mind sent a message to my hypothalamus, told it to release the hormone CRF into the short vessels connecting my hypothalamus and my pituitary gland. [. . .] Everything my body had done so far fell within normal operating procedures for a human machine. [. . .] Trout had had a full day already, but it wasn’t over yet. Now he saw his Creator leap completely over an automobile. (296-97).

The description of the chemical reactions occurring inside the narrator’s brain further demonstrates that he really has no more power over his own creation than any of his own characters. If he was the all-powerful Creator, he could have put his hand up and stopped the dog in midair. He could have turned him into anything he wanted, but instead the dog leaps at him, and the narrator leaps over a car. He continues: “I landed on my hands and knees in the middle of Fairchild Boulevard. Kazak was flung back by the fence. Gravity took charge of him as it had taken charge of me. Gravity slammed him down on the concrete” (297). Language is equated to gravity in that gravity is something else we have no control over. Both language and gravity have taken over the events. The narrator sees again that no matter how much he thinks he is in control of language, he truly isn’t.

In the final events of the novel, Studge attempts to explain to Kilgore Trout that he is a character in a story the narrator has created, but he is being set free. He tells Trout bluntly, “ ‘I am a novelist, and I created you for use in my books’” (299). Trout is speechless and the only thing he can ask of his creator is “ ‘Do you have a gun?’” (299). Studge “shatter[s] his power to doubt” (299) by bringing him to various places all over the universe, which brings Trout to his knees, cowering. The narrator, again, has no control over the reaction of his own creation. He is trying to give him the answers, but Trout does not see that. In a final, climactic speech, the narrator explains to Trout what the entire novel has been building toward:

Mr. Trout—Kilgore—[. . .] I hold in my hand a symbol of wholeness and harmony and nourishment. It is Oriental in its simplicity, but we are Americans, Kilgore, and not Chinamen. We Americans require symbols which are richly colored and three-dimensional and juicy. Most of all, we hunger for symbols which have not been poisoned by great sins our nation has committed, such as slavery and genocide and criminal neglect, or by tinhorn commercial greed and cunning. [. . .] He saw that I held an apple in my hand. (300-1)

This new symbol, created by attributing a new pragmatic meaning to something already in existence, is what the narrator has been driving at. America, as a nation, needs to abandon its history of “great sins” and look toward a future where its symbols represent something wholly good and are not tainted by a gruesome past. America needs to believe in something because it is good, not because it has value.

This seems like something Kilgore Trout should understand. Throughout the entire novel, the narrator has noted Trout’s questioning of pragmatic language interpretation. All of Trout’s novels and short stories treat the core problems of humanity with childlike simplicity. After this new American symbol is presented to Trout, the narrator says to him, “ ‘Arise, Mr. Trout, you are free, you are free’” (301). Studge seems to ignore his own earlier conclusion: No one is free from language. However, he has set Trout free in another way. He has shown him that he too is trapped by language. If Trout can recognize this and act accordingly, then he will be free. Everyone else will continue on, passively allowing language to control them. “For others, tonight will be a night like any other night,” Studge tells Trout (301). This is really nothing new for Trout. He has seemed to understand humanity’s problems better than anyone since the beginning.

As the narrator “somersault[s] lazily and pleasantly through the void” (301) back to his reality outside of his text, he hears his father’s voice issuing from Kilgore Trout’s mouth. Studge begins to cry, and draws a picture of his eye shedding a tear. Trout is shouting, “ ‘Make me young, make me young, make me young!’” (302). He missed the point. After being told the secret of his own existence and being shown the type of symbol that could bring humanity back from the brink of disaster, all Trout can see is his own vanity. He knows the man he was just talking to is his creator. All he wants is to be made young again. The narrator’s actions then parallel the story of the actual Creator of the Universe. Studge has referenced this Creator throughout the novel without acknowledging an affiliation—it is just The Creator in general. The way Studge’s actions parallel this Creator are without affiliation as well: The Creator sent the solution, the way to save ourselves, yet many can only see vanity. Studge sheds a tear for his own creation just as he imagines The Creator would shed a tear for those of us who do not understand.

The question then becomes: Is this a pessimistic ending? Is humanity doomed to vanity and misunderstanding: Doomed to continually be trapped by language? The narrator’s use of “ETC” drawn large and ornately at the end of Trout’s plea has been used throughout the novel. At first, the narrator doesn’t use the abbreviation. He simply says “And so on” countless times. Once he enters the text, he begins drawing the letters, the abbreviated form of “et cetera,” which denotes “and so on” and is “occasionally used when the conclusion of a quotation, a current formula of politeness, or the like, is omitted as being well known to the reader” (OED). In the novel, the phrase is usually included after some instance of human suffering, or something that is overly familiar. When the drawing is included, Studge prefaces it by saying, “The proper ending for any story about people it seems to me, since life is now a polymer in which the Earth is wrapped so tightly, should be that same abbreviation, which I now write large because I feel like it” (Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions 234). He, of course, ends his own story with the abbreviation, indicating that Trout’s vanity, his disappointing behavior, should be well known to the reader. It is innate in all of us.

If this behavior is innate, if it is well known, if it is expected, then what hope can there be for a future with symbols to believe in such as the apple presented to Kilgore Trout—to bring humanity back from the brink of disaster? The narrator’s ending is a warning. It is a warning against vanity. It is a warning against a pragmatic reality based on a history of great sins. My epigraph is quoted from an early Vonnegut novel in which the main character is giving a speech at a baptism. The only thing he can think to tell the babies, new to the Earth, untainted by the horrors humanity has inflicted upon itself, is that being kind is the only thing we have control over. Vonnegut’s humanism comes through in another sense in Breakfast of Champions. Human beings may be trapped by language; humans may not be in control of their own reality even with the ability to construct it, but recognizing that rather than passively ignoring it is the only solution. We have the ability to recognize that we do not control our own reality.

Works Cited

Bawdin, H. Heath. “What Is Pragmatism?” The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods. 1 (4 Aug. 1904): 421-27.

Culler, Jonathan. “Semiotics and Deconstruction.” Poetics Today 1.1/2 Special Issue: Literature, Interpretation, Communication (Autumn 1979): 137-41.

Derrida, Jaques. “Différance.” Margins of Philosophy. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982.

“et cetera, n. 1” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 13 Nov. 2007. 50078371spg1?single=1&query_type=misspelling&queryword=etc&first=1&max_to_sh ow=10&hilite=50078371spg1>

Gholson, Bill. “Narrative, Self, and Morality in the Writing of Kurt Vonnegut.” At Millennium’s End: New Essays On the Work of Kurt Vonnegut. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001

Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Vonnegut Effect. Columbia, SC: The University of South Carolina Press, 2004.

Melchert, Norman. The Great Conversation: Volume II: Decartes through Derrida and Quine. 4th Ed. Boston: McGraw Hill, 2002.

Prescott, Peter S. “Nothing Sacred.” Newsweek. (14 May 1973): 114.

Rackstraw, Loree. “The Paradox of ‘Awareness’ and Language in Vonnegut’s Fiction.” Kurt Vonnegut: Images and Representations. Ed. Marc Leeds and Peter J. Reed. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Rovit, Earl. “Some Shapes in Recent American Fiction.” Contemporary Literature. 15 (Autumn 1974): 539-61.

Todd, Richard. “Review of Breakfast of Champions.” The Atlantic. 231 (May 1973): 106.

Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. New York: Random House, 1973.

— Wampeters, Foma, and Granfalloons. New York: Dell, 1979.

No One Believes in Magic Anymore: Irony, Communism, and the Reality of the Supernatural

Woland, one of the major characters in Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, is introduced within the first few pages of the novel as man who was later described multiple ways, but the narrator notes that, “all of the reports were worthless” (5). The most important thing about Woland, the narrator states, is that he is a foreigner (6). This is an irony that is continued throughout the narrative; he is actually a foreigner nowhere because he is Satan.

Woland’s purpose in the narrative functions primarily in one of three episodes that take place in the novel: The Moscow episode. The irony of Woland’s character is that he is the devil, he is supernatural, he exists in the reality of the narrative, yet at the beginning of the novel, no one believes he exists. This irony is drawn throughout the Muscovite episode. Bulgakov uses this irony to comment on the harm the oppressive communist regime of Josef Stalin brought on the Russian people.

The title of the first chapter, “Never Talk to Strangers” is an ironic twist on the consequences of Berlioz and Bezdomny’s conversation with Woland. The title refers not only to those consequences but also to the restrictions placed on the Russian people with regards to speaking to foreigners for fear of spies. This fear is especially apparent in the first chapter as Berlioz and Bezdomny mentally try to guess where Woland is from. Their conversation with Woland sets the events of the novel in motion when they tell him, “We don’t believe in God” (7). They go on to tell Woland that their country “made a conscious decision long ago not to believe the fairy tales about God” (7). These facts about Communist Russia become very important throughout the Muscovite episode particularly with nearly every character involved in the episode, including the narrator, continually repeats clichés regarding the devil such as “The devil knows what’s going on [. . .] the devil knew how [. . .] the devil knows what [. . .] the devil only knows” and so on (87, 90, 97, 105). The irony of these phrases is that devil, Woland, really does know what is happening in each instance, making the statements no longer clichés but ironic statements of fact.

The irony is continued in many specific scenes; the most important is the chapter titled “Black Magic and Its Exposé.” Woland decides to demonstrate his power to the people of Moscow. He secures a slot at the theater managed in part by Stepan Styopa Likhodeyev. When Woland appears in Stepan’s apartment and isn’t recognized, Woland asks him, “What? You’ve forgotten my name too?” referring to the atheism of the entire country (65). On the night of the performance, the master of ceremonies introduces Woland thus:

I would like to present the famous foreign artiste, Monsieur Woland, in a performance of black magic! Of course, you and I know [. . .] that there is no such thing in the world as black magic, and it is nothing other than a superstition and that Maestro Woland is simply a master of conjuring technique, a fact which will become obvious in the most interesting part of his performance, that is, when he reveals the secrets behind his technical skill. (100)

Again, the atheism of the nation is presented and in an overtly, almost unnecessarily obvious way. The emcee comes across as attempting to stifle any belief in magic that Woland’s tricks might bring about. Of course, the tricks are real.

Woland begins the show, first by appearing in a chair out of thin air followed by a question he poses to his assistant: “Tell me, dear Fagot [. . .] have the Muscovites changed, in your opinion, in any significant way? (101). At first, he answers his own question by discussing modern inventions which were not present during his last visit to Moscow. The audience is completely silent, still stunned by Woland’s miraculous appearance. After a brief interruption, courtesy of the emcee, Woland writes off the exterior changes saying he is “not so much interested” in those things and states that “A much more important question is: have the Muscovites changed on inside” (101)? This is one of the central questions of Bulgakov’s text itself and the rest of the chapter makes a clear statement about the condition of the Muscovites during his lifetime and while under Stalinist rule.

Bulgakov’s answer would most likely be, “No, they haven’t changed. They only pretend to have.” The reality, as Woland demonstrates, is that while the Muscovites pretend to be large supporters of communism and its ideals, especially the condemnation of capitalist materialism, they are subject to the temptations of materialism like anyone else. Woland punishes the Muscovites for this. Fagot makes money fall from the sky creating chaos among the audience as they rush to grab the money shouting at each other, “That’s mine! It was coming toward me! [. . .] Don’t push me or I’ll push you back” (103)! The emcee assures the citizens that there is an explanation for the money, and ironically, the true explanation is that Fagot literally made money appear out of nowhere. Fagot then orders Behemoth, the giant black cat, to tear off the emcee’s head, which prompts the audience to cry out for the head to be returned, still believing that what they are seeing is not real. Woland begins a meditative speech, directed at Fagot, prompted by the audience’s pleas: “They are people like anywhere. They love money, but that has always been true... People love money, no matter what it is made of, leather, paper, bronze, or gold. And they are thoughtless... but, then again, sometimes mercy enters their hearts... they are ordinary people” (104). This is a blatant statement about the Muscovites under Stalinist rule: They only pretend to have changed on the inside. Deep down, what is truly human about them hasn’t changed, so to pretend as though it has is ridiculous.

Woland makes the Muscovites look truly ridiculous when he invites the women in the audience to receive new clothes in exchange for their old. Shortly after the incident with the emcee, Woland quietly disappears with his armchair and allows Fagot and Behemoth to finish the show. A store appears on stage, again out of nowhere, and the women in the audience, after seeing the success of one woman and her new shoes, rush the stage in a frenzy, completely ignoring the very tenants that are supposed to make communism superior to capitalism. Even after this, the audience still does not believe what they witnessed to be reality, and a man demands an exposé. Fagot reveals that the man is having an affair, sending the audience once again into complete chaos. Fagot and Behemoth disappear just as Woland had, and the show is over. As soon as it ends, all the new clothes disappear, leaving many women in their underwear, running around in the street outside the theater. They are tricked by Woland who perceived the Muscovites to have ultimately changed for the worse.

Bulgakov uses the irony of a real supernatural power existing in and interacting with an atheistic society to convey his own feelings toward the oppression imposed by communist rule in Russia. Through Woland, the reader is confronted with the belief that no matter what rules are imposed, human beings do not truly change inside. There are certain traits that are always innately human. Bulgakov and his countrymen hadn’t changed; many simply pretended.

Works Cited

Bulgakov, Mikhail. The Master and Margarita. Trans. Diana Burgin and Katherine Tiernan O’Connor. New York: Vintage International, 1995.