As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

And so on. Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would also be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done. If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead. It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done.

Basic set up:

Letting the reader in on his thoughts as he nears his 50th birthday, Vonnegut reveals that he's been thinking about American politics and literature. In this passage, he sums up his conclusions and what they mean for his own writing.

Though he'd already written some pioneering counterculture texts, Vonnegut went full-on postmodern in Breakfast of Champions. As this passage signals, Breakfast of Champions is hardly a typical novel. There are all kinds of postmodern devices at play here, but fragmentation takes the cake. And Vonnegut isn't just using it for playful reasons—he seems to have political stuff on his mind, too.

The passage in question draws a comparison between cultural politics and literature: one character shooting another is a convenient way of ending a story, and big-part players often get a raw deal in literature. But what if this applies to life? When real people are treated as expendable, things get much more serious.

So what's Vonnegut's conclusion? To move away from the kind of storytelling that's "making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation" and write about life in all its chaotic glory.

This passage makes us think of a segment near the beginning of the novel in which Vonnegut explains that he's trying to clear his head of all the "junk" in there. He doesn't just mean junk as in snippets of movies, half-remembered jokes, and all that sort of clutter. He's talking about the cultural ideas and beliefs that he's been bombarded with for five decades. It's like a cleansing process: he wants to try to empty his head of all this outside stuff, and he recommends that other folks give this a go, too.

Taken together, these two passages are explanatory: their job is to enlighten us on why Vonnegut has gone for a style that's chaotic and fragmented. It's kind of like a postmodern manifesto in that it encourages others to embrace this chaos. If it seems like there's no order, then we shouldn't try to force order upon the world—or literature. What's wrong with fragmentation anyway? Vonnegut recognizes that it can be hard, but that doesn't mean it's impossible.