I’m going to say Vonnegut is, of course, writing to the Creator of the Universe (who, notice without flinching, is none other than the reader) at least in Breakfast of Champions.  I never asked myself who the writer is writing to, outside the confines of the story, who is the record for, who is the letter to.  Only to slump moderately in the direction of filling in the writing, I’ll gloss over how Vonnegut’s audience is clearly the Creator of The Universe.  There’s the audience of the story, what the world serves up, likee-or-notee, and there’s the audience to whom the writer writes.  Or for whom, but not about whom, that’s the story.

Why write, just to move the hand?  One anticipates an audience, a reader, a recipient, even an imaginary one, even the self.  B says Nabokov was a masturbatory writer, which I might re-term ecstatic, that is, writing written for the sensation of it falling from wherever through the mind and/or the fingers to the used-to-be-a-page. Writing for the self.  In the early pages, long before the paperback is able to hold itself open, Vonnegut describes the response he would have written, had he had a writing implement, to a question scrawled in a bathroom to the order of ‘what is the meaning of life?’ V’s response, to be the eyes, and ears, and so on of the Creator of the Universe.  This passage, when considered along with Kilgore’s stated possible life mission of describing the world to The Creator (his writing is so sharp, isn’t it, and so natural, V’s, that is) and the sharp hides up under a moping, juvenile writing style that, Hallelujah, serves the writing itself rather than any sort of convention (a wall busted earliest by poets).  V seems to consider himself illegitimate, yet driven, in ways I can drink to. I decide Kilgore’s musing plus the unwritten response graffiti indicate audience.  But I also don’t think V is a dummy, and so I take it one step further and decide V pulls a most hilarious instantiated prank, because, you know, the reader is me, or you, or whoever is the reader but that reader is always always always a first person experience, always the ‘me.’  V dangles us over the precipice of our God nature, but he is not mean, either.  Quickly he draws a cow, or a pretty spot-on 70’s Holiday Inn sign, or an anus, in the same juvenile hand of his swanky Rosewater, which helps the me-us forget the nausea.

Nov 5 12