Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Blue Monday is a 1973 novel by the American author Kurt Vonnegut. It is his seventh novel, and it is set predominantly in the fictional town of Midland City, Ohio.

The book focuses on two characters. Dwayne Hoover is a Midland City resident, a Pontiac dealer and an affluent figure in the town, and Kilgore Trout is a science fiction author who has been published widely but read hardly at all. The plot is the sequence of events that brings them into the same room, and the consequences of Hoover taking Trout's fiction as an account of reality are the novel's subject.

Vonnegut deals with free will, suicide and race relations among other themes, and the book is full of playful drawings made by the author. The title comes from a breakfast cereal slogan, and the novel is usually read as the point where Vonnegut's style became most openly self-referential. The drawings are part of the text rather than illustrations of it, and the narrator addresses the reader directly. Kilgore Trout's fiction is taken as a factual account by Hoover, which is how the satire arrives: a bad writer's invention becomes a real man's belief.