Breakfast of Champions

Breakfast of Champions

by

Kurt Vonnegut

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Breakfast of Champions makes teaching easy.

Celia Hoover Character Analysis

Dwayne Hoover’s wife and Bunny’s mother. Like Vonnegut’s own mother, Celia commits suicide when she drinks a bottle of Drāno, a type of commercial drain cleaner. Celia struggles with her mental health for several years before she kills herself, yet her family never seems to notice. Celia represents mental illness and suicide within American society, but more specifically, her experiences and the indifference of her family echoes society’s tendency to avoid acknowledging and treating mental illness, and the tragic consequences of that avoidance.

Celia Hoover Quotes in Breakfast of Champions

The Breakfast of Champions quotes below are all either spoken by Celia Hoover or refer to Celia Hoover. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Art, Subjectivity, and Absurdity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 17 Quotes

Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Drāno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), George / Bunny Hoover, Celia Hoover
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Breakfast of Champions LitChart as a printable PDF.
Breakfast of Champions PDF

Celia Hoover Quotes in Breakfast of Champions

The Breakfast of Champions quotes below are all either spoken by Celia Hoover or refer to Celia Hoover. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Art, Subjectivity, and Absurdity Theme Icon
).
Chapter 17 Quotes

Listen: Bunny’s mother and my mother were different sorts of human beings, but they were both beautiful in exotic ways, and they both boiled over with chaotic talk about love and peace and wars and evil and desperation, of better days coming by and by, of worse days coming by and by. And both our mothers committed suicide. Bunny’s mother ate Drāno. My mother ate sleeping pills, which wasn’t nearly as horrible.

Related Characters: Kurt Vonnegut (speaker), George / Bunny Hoover, Celia Hoover
Page Number: 186
Explanation and Analysis: