Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

When I first watched Adaptation, I was inspired by its originality, its creative implementation of self-awareness and self-reference. More and more I've been discovering, however, that Charlie Kaufman's incredible screenplay was not exactly that revolutionary or original. It is, however the most well-done film of the self-referencing kind. In the back of my mind, I had dreamed of writing a novel like Adaptation, something that was about writing the novel itself, a story that somehow embroiled its own writer, me, into the action and the misadventure. I thought it would be a novel idea for a novel.

Too late. Kurt Vonnegut did it already in the 70's with his incredible book Breakfast of Champions. I had always believed that the self-referencing work was a mark of the 21st century, but clearly Vonnegut was breaking the same ground three decades ago. It's a book that skewers, satirizes, explains, elucidates, and criticizes almost all the little foibles of modern American society you can think of, tackling everything from racism to coffee tables. Vonnegut decides from the beginning to remove all that has been implanted into his head by his interactions with society, becoming an unbiased, objective viewer of American life. His tone, consequently, is at times child-like and even extra-terrestrial. This allows him to reveal the irrationalities of mankind with the freshness of an innocent youth or a bewildered alien. The ending is a crescendo of pure noise, a moment here, a flash there, collapsing under the weight of all this observation until even the author can not resist being sucked in to the vortex which finally ends in the assurance that the universe is cyclical, and what once was has always been, and what is now will always be.

And so on.