Breakfast of Champions

by Kurt Vonnegut

Breakfast of Champions: Style 1 key example

Chapter 1
Explanation and Analysis:

Vonnegut's style is direct, frank, comic, and simple. He uses ordinary words and tends to avoid flowery imagery. A great example occurs in Chapter One, when Vonnegut first describes America:

Everybody in America was supposed to grab whatever he could and hold on to it. Some Americans were very good at grabbing and holding, were fabulously well-to-do. Others couldn't get their hands on doodley-squat. 

Dwayne Hoover was fabulously well-to-do when he met Kilgore Trout. A man whispered those exact words to a friend one morning as Dwayne walked by: "Fabulously well-to-do."

And here's how much of the planet Kilgore Trout owned in those days: doodley-squat.