Thursday, May 8, 2014

Breakfast's climax is charged but not emotionally so

After Karabekian's really effective (and affecting) speech, Breakfast of Champions comes down for what is more technically its climax. Weirdly.

As mentioned before, Vonnegut writes this book in a strangely clinical way. As such the emotional impact of Dwayne's climactic breakdown and rampage is lost in the mix. We can see the way that the man showing us snapshots of psychotic Dwayne and providing explanations becomes agitated as Dwayne tears into his homosexual son Bunny and his secretary Francine, but that emotion doesn't come across in the text.

Yet, even without much emotion in this highly charged moment of the book, it's still compelling. This is what the book's been building to, after all. But I think the shocking nature of Dwayne's actions is what does it more than the way that those actions are described.

Dwayne's beating his son and secretary is affective not because they're characters we've come to learn deeply about and love, but because Dwayne himself is established as such a buttoned-down character. Even though we've been told all book long that Dwayne goes crazy in the end, the extreme nature of his actions still shocks.

In a way then, Vonnegut might not tug heart strings directly, but his distance makes all more the tragic the state of human madness and its ripple effects.

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