Ayjia

While reading the excerpt from Breakfast of Champions , I noticed a similarity to what I felt was a central idea of A Wild Sheep Chase . Vonnegut writes about Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout; a car dealer and an author. The car dealer is so mentally vulnerable that Trout’s science fiction writing convinced Dwayne that everyone was a robot except him. Trout then becomes obsessed with the notion that, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!” This is the similarity I see in A Wild Sheep Chase . In Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase , the sheep “spirit” shall we call it, enters into vulnerable people and uses their host to gain power. We can understand Murakami’s existential motivations when we situate him as a post-World War II author, writing with strong reference to the Fifteen Years’ War. He seems to imply that some people are blind to their own indoctrination, and that greed can easily corrupt people. In both Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle , the two Vonnegut novels I’m fami...