Deconstructing American History in 'Breakfast of Champions' Joel Abraham Atallah College

Postmodernism is the idea that no grand narratives, metanarratives, and ideologies truly exist. It's the rejection of everything and then claiming that the metanarrative, that there are no metanarratives, is the real metanarrative. This essentially leads to a school of thought where everything is to be questioned, including things that are taken for granted and not thought about extensively. This process of stripping back ideas is dubbed as “deconstruction.” In his novel “Breakfast of Champions,” Kurt Vonnegut uses postmodern deconstruction to show bizarreness and wrongdoing in American history by using a lack of metanarrative and by flipping the narrrative. Vonnegut uses postmodern deconstruction to point out how silly some parts of American history appear once they are put under this scope of analysis.

To make his approach more accessible to the average reader though, Vonnegut uses the word “impolite” as a synonym for “postmodern deconstruction.” Vonnegut writes, “She taught us to be impolite in conversation not only about sexual matters, but about American history and famous heroes, about the distribution of wealth, about school, about everything” (85). To be “impolite” in this context is to then microscopically analyze...