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标题：Existential Crisis in Post-War American Fiction: A Study of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions.
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作者：IRFAN MOHAMMAD MALIK
期刊名称：Indian Streams Research Journal
印刷版ISSN：2230-7850
出版年度：2012
卷号：II
期号：XI
出版社：Indian Streams Research Journal
摘要：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
关键词：american;post-war;vonnegut;dwayne;vonnegut