Breakfast Of Champions Essays - Kilgore Trout,

Breakfast Of Champions Book Report on Breakfast of Champions By Marcel Burney When one hears the phrase Breakfast of Champions, he envisions a grinning picture of Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan slam dunking, or Dale Earnhardt in a racecar on a box of Wheaties, a popular breakfast cereal. A few avid Saturday Night Live fans might recall a skit performed by James Belushi. In the skit, Belushis Breakfast of Champions was beer, cigarettes, and donuts. Neither of these examples are the subject of Kurt Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions or Good Bye Blue Morning. A Breakfast of Champions is actually a martini. Breakfast of Champions is a work of fiction with semi-autobiographical allusions. The main characters of the book are Kilgore Trout, Dwayne Hoover, and Philboyd Sludge. Kilgore Trout installs aluminum combination storm windows and screens and writes science fiction novels and short stories. He has no ambition to be a famous writer, so he sends his works to pornographic magazine companies to be published. The names and characters of his works are often changed in the process, and he is rarely paid for his efforts. Dwayne Hoover owns a successful Pontiac dealership. He slowly loses his sanity as the plot unfolds. Philboyd Sludge creates these characters and appears in the story to watch the characters as the story progresses. Breakfast of Champions depicts the story of Kilgores travel to Midland City to speak at a festival of arts. Kilgore, at first, rejects the invitation, but he decides to go because he wants to be a representative of all the thousands of artists who devoted their entire lives to a search for truth and beautyand didnt find doodley-squat (37). He intends to hitchhike to Midland City and appear at the arts festival as a nasty old man. Along the way, he is robbed. He continues hitchhiking and is picked up various truckers. He walks to his hotel after being caught in a traffic jam a mile away. Kilgores arrives at the hotel. He prepares to make a grand entrance as a red-eyed, filthy old creature but is thwarted when the desk clerk recognizes him. Kilgore cleans-up and travels down to the cocktail lounge, where he would soon meet Dwayne Hoover. Kilgores luminescent shirt under the ultraviolet lights attracts Hoover to his table. Hoover demands for Kilgore to give him the message. Hoover snatches Now It Can Be Told, one of Kilgores novels, from the table. The book says that there is only one being with free will, everyone else is a robot (253). The book drives Hoover insane. He believes he is the only one with free will. He begins attacking people in the lounge. He bites off Kilgores middle finger. Hoover leaves the hotel and attacks the people he meets outside until he is placed in a mental hospital. After Kilgore leaves the hospital, he meets Philboyd Sludge, who reveals that he is Kilgores creator. Philboyd then frees him. Vonnegut makes several social commentaries throughout the novel. The most noticeable are color and freedom. He describes Christopher Columbus as a white sea pirate who discovers a land already settled by the copper-colored Native Americans (11). The sea pirates created a government which became a beacon of freedom to human beings everywhere else (10). However, the sea pirates created a government that owned slaves, which were black. The system of slavery and oppression of Native Americans totally contradicted the foundation of America. Philboyd freed Kilgore at the end of the novel, which was similar to the emancipation of the slaves. I enjoyed reading Vonneguts Breakfast of Champions. The book provided a fresh insight on society, even though it was written in 1973. I enjoyed the chaos that Kilgore created along his travel to Midland City. His influenced people to rename mirrors to leaks, which implied that mirrors were leaks to other universes. Kilgore also convinced the police department and newspaper to believe that a purely fictional gang, the Pluto Gang, attacked and robbed him. An article was published in the paper, which caused parents to warn their children to watch out for the Pluto Gang. Vonnegut describes society fairly accurately. The book made me look at history and society in a new light. Book Reports

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley

Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley Mary Wollstonecraft was a pioneer in feminist thinking and writing. The author gave birth to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in 1797. Wollstonecraft died soon after childbirth due to a fever. How could this have influenced Shelley’s writings? Although her mother did not live long enough to influence Shelley directly, it is clear that the Wollstonecraft and the ideas of the Romantic era greatly shaped Shelley’s beliefs. The Life of Mary Wollstonecraft Wollstonecraft was strongly influenced by Thomas Paine and argued that women deserved equal rights. She saw how her own father treated her mother as property and refused to allow the same future for herself. When she became old enough, she earned a living as a governess but was bored with this work. She wanted to challenge her high intellect. When she was 28, she wrote a semi-autobiographical novel titled Maria. She soon moved to London and became an admired professional writer and editor who wrote about the rights of women and children. In 1790, Wollstonecraft wrote her essay A Vindication of the Rights of Men based on her reaction to the French Revolution. This essay influenced her famous feminist social study A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, which she wrote two years later. The work continues to be read in literature and Womens studies classes today. Wollstonecraft experienced two romantic affairs and gave birth to Fanny before falling in love with William Godwin. By November  1796, she became pregnant with their only child, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Godwin and she were married in March of the following year. During the summer, she began writing The Wrongs of Women: or Maria. Shelley was born on August 30 and Wollstonecraft died less than two weeks later. Godwin raised both Fanny and Mary surrounded by philosophers and poets, such as Coleridge and Lamb. He also taught Mary to read and spell her name by having her trace her mothers inscription on the stone. Mary Shelley and Frankenstein With much of the independent spirit that drove her mother, Mary left home when she was 16 to live with her lover, Percy Shelley, who was unhappily married at the time. Society and even her father treated her as an outcast. This rejection influenced her writings greatly. Along with the suicides of Percys estranged wife and then Marys half-sister Fanny, her alienated status inspired her to write her greatest work, Frankenstein. Frankenstein is often referenced as the start of Science Fiction. Legend  claims that Shelley wrote the whole book in one night as part of a competition between herself, Percy Shelley, Lord Byron and John Polidori. The aim was to see who could write the best horror story. While Shelleys tale isnt usually classified as a horror it did spawn a new genre mixing moral questions with science.