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Volume : II, Issue : XI, December - 2012 Existential Crisis in Post-War American Fiction: A Study of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions. IRFAN MOHAMMAD MALIK Published By : Laxmi Book Publication Abstract : Twentieth Century American novelists brought about certain radical
transformations in novel writing, reflecting in their works an apocalyptic tendency in
describing contemporary human culture, life and civilization on getting fractured,
debased and above all dehumanized. These novelists made their works as symbolic of the
totally recreated image of the human identity, the human self, and there by composing a
new mythology of the space and machine age with the illustrations of a totally different
protagonistic situation in the fictional societies of their novels. Kurt Vonnegut, one the
representative novelists of post-war America, repeatedly portrays his heroes as
perpetually engaged in unraveling the mystery of human predicament. The meaning of
life functions as a pivot round which the bulk of Vonnegut's fiction revolves. Vonnegut's
heroes, like their other fictional counterparts in contemporary American fiction,
experience an ironic mode of existence. In Breakfast of Champions protagonist's
existence is defined by irony with the shadow of apocalypse looming large because the
love and appetite of post-modern American materialism serves only to aggravate man's
alienation and the trial and tribulations of his existence. The ethos of mass society has
made Dwayne Hoover, the hero of the novel, a mere dust particle that floats aimlessly
across a sea of absurdity to his eventual self-annihilation Keywords : Article : Cite This Article : IRFAN MOHAMMAD MALIK, (2012). Existential Crisis in Post-War American Fiction: A Study of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.. Indian Streams Research Journal, Vol. II, Issue. XI, http://oldisrj.lbp.world/UploadedData/1708.pdf References : - Frye, Northrop. Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957.
- Galloway, David. The absurd Hero in American Fiction. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1966.
- Hassan, Ihab. Radical Innocence: Studies in Contemporary American Novel. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1961.
- “The Culture of Postmodernism”, excerpts from Modernism in the Plural: Challenges and Perspectives. Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 1985.
- Hauck, Richard Boyd. A Cheerful Nihilism. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1971.
- Howe, Irving. “Mass Society and Postmodern Fiction”. Patricia Waugh (ed). Postmodernism: A Reader. New York: Chapman & Hall,1992.
- Vonnegut, Kurt. Breakfast of Champions. London: Jonathan Cape, 1973.
- Weinberg, Helen. The New Novel in America: The Kafkan Mode in Contemporary Fiction. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press, 1970.
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