Breakfast of Champions
I actually used an excerpt from this book for my senior quote:
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
Ever since then I have repeatedly thought to myself...what an absolutely ATROCIOUS senior quote. I have spent years hating this quote. I mean good God what kind of up-his-own-ass high-schooler chooses that as a senior quote? When he gets told he can pick any sequence of words ever written by any schmuck in the history of language he picks a quote that communicates exactly two things: "I am charming" and "I read books by Kurt Vonnegut". It has been a dark pool of ichor lingering in the back corner of my mind and self-image for years now.
Anyway I finally got around to re-rereading the book. I've been going through Vonnegut's stuff chronologically now that I'm a bit older and can understand the milieu in which he wrote. But despite any of that historical or literary crap/context there was a core of this book I was afraid of. That was seeing the context for such a cringey quote that somehow enraptured my teenage brain enough to have it show up under my name in a yearbook.
I got to the passage I had been dreading...and it was excellent. I fell in love with it again. All of the banality that I had attributed to this quote was simply incorrect. The quote has layers to it that are baffling and brilliant. For my own sanity and possible penance I'll try to give a way-too-in-depth-but-still-not-complete rundown of why these words are good words.
Breakfast of Champions itself is a deconstruction of novel storytelling and is told via a collage of hanging signifiers. Images are created to be symbols for the absolutely mundane, names are highlighted that once dripped with significance and now represent products shipped across the country in trucks. Odd semi-parallels appear between the modern world and archetypal tales like Cinderella. One character mistakes an airport tarmac as a fairyland. Another wears glass slippers made of runoff from a chemical plant. Step-siblings exist. Each of these symbols are meant to invoke the original meaning but also to highlight the decay of the symbols in our postmodern world, while ironically using those symbols hypereffectively.
In addition to that collage-fairytale structure of the book we have Vonnegut playing with narration. The book is in third-person omniscient voice for the first 20 pages or so. And the narrator is disinterested -- he describes the world as if giving a depressing overview for an alien species about what bad things exist in the world and how all signal has fallen into the noise. But then suddenly the narration breaks down to first-person and then switches back. And for the rest of the book Kurt Vonnegut Jr., the author, slowly becomes a character.
So here's the full quote in context on page 20 of my edition:
Charm was a scheme for making strangers like and trust a person immediately, no matter what the charmer had in mind.
* * *
Dwayne Hoover had oodles of charm
* * *
I can have oodles of charm when I want to.
* * *
A lot of people have oodles of charm.
* * *
Did you catch it? It's shocking enough that it's easy to miss when you're reading the book. The author is now alive in the book and he is looking out from it at you. He's pierced the veil of the novel and created not a third-person detached world, but his own world which is our world and he has synthesized all of them into the experience of reading this book. He's done what, from the perspective of the novel itself, is magic. He's cast a spell that breaks the rules he had created for us. He's charmed us.
And he thinks it's hilarious.
He's made us like and trust him because he has personalized the book for us and his trick is just that -- a charm. He's taken the banal modern use of the word, mostly used to describe people who are good at selling useless crap, and he's made it clear that he himself is capable of selling useless crap. But that "useless" crap is this novel which he is selling to us. And in the novel he is now character and god and author and reader. He has made us trust and like him and in doing so he has performed literary magic of which I have only highlighted the surface here.
Here I thought he was just good at drawing assholes.
The largest component of the charm for me, though, was regaining some positive self-image. I remembered when I re-read the quote in context why I chose it. It wasn't just a random way to tell people "I'm charming" --ew) -- it was a way to tell people "Hey, I'm in here. I'm in first person. I am subject and object and I have reality that happens to coincide with the book you hold in your hands and every piece of it is magical." And so for Vonnegut's sorcery I remain charmed and grateful. And so on.