In Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut, the “yin and yang” symbol in chapter one carries out a great deal of meaning. Upon writing Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut explains his sort of suspicion that all human beings are actually robots. In Vonnegut’s novel, he introduces two main characters were Dwayne Hoover, who was a Pontiac dealer who was going insane, and Kilgore Trout, who was a science-fiction writer. Vonnegut said that Hoover’s emerging insanity was predominantly a matter of chemicals, which made his mind unstable. However, Vonnegut believed Dwayne needed some bad ideas, just like anyone else, so that his “craziness could have shape and direction.” Vonnegut attributes the mental illness of Dwayne Hoover and society a great deal to an abundance of “bad chemicals” and “bad ideas”, which …show more content…
Trout told Hoover “everybody on Earth was a robot, with one exception-Dwayne Hoover.” Because of this, Dwayne Hoover was the only one who had free will. However, the book Trout had wrote was not addressed to Dwayne; it was addressed to anyone who had happened to open it and read it. The book was for anyone who had eyes. The message of the book was that the person reading it was the “only creature with free will.” These ideas not only gave Dwayne bad ideas, but they also made him mad, putting him into an asylum. Trout later became obsessed with the fact ideas cannot only cause disease, but cure it as well. At first, Kilgore Trout was just an old man who thought he was a nobody at the time. But, because of his book and because he made Dwayne so sick, he later became a “pioneer in the field of mental health.” Because he was documented as a great artist and scientist when he died, The American Academy of Arts and Sciences built a monument for him with an engraving that stated, “We are healthy only to the extent that our ideas are