Kurt Vonnegut is the writer of the, "Breakfast of Champions," which is a postmodern literary work where Vonnegut attempted to make several ethical or moral stances about various topics through his fiction. One of those stances is the concept of the free will. He reflects his own ideas about the concept of free will by using the characters he created. There is also a movie version of this novel which is filmed in 1999, directed by Alan Rudolph. Rudolph artistically tried to give the stances that Vonnegut makes to the audience of the movie. Thus, we can see clear similarities between the movie and the novel. In order to understand how the concept of free will is portrayed both in the novel and the book, the concept itself must be analyzed and then how it is portrayed in the book and the novel can be analyzed and understood. .
What is the concept of free will? It must be understood what it is before it is analyzed. According to the Merriam-Webster (an Encyclopedia Britannica Company), free will is the ability to make choices that are not controlled by fate or God. Simply it means that everyone with a free will can make their own decisions. In the novel Vonnegut gave this ability to only one character, Dwayne Hoover. In the novel he stated that with these words: "Everybody else was a fully automatic machine, whose purpose was to stimulate Dwayne. Dwayne was a new type of creature being tested by the creator of the Universe. Only Dwayne Hoover had free will," (Vonnegut 14). Basically the whole universe was only created to observe what Dwayne will do. Vonnegut wanted to make reader question his existence and the choices that they makes are really belong to them. It can be said that he was pretty successful delivering his thoughts through his fiction. That stance is portrayed both in the book and the movie a common part from each should be analyzed in order to understand how the stance is portrayed in each.