Note: After reading one of your outside books, use Stephen's examplary essay as a model for how to do this assignment. Note how he first establishes a theme by giving his essay a title; then he goes on to introduce the idea in a nice introductory paragraph. Only then, in the second paragraph, does he begin to use his outside book for example to illustrate his ideas about insanity.

Stephen H.

English Period 5

1-20-01

Insanity

There is a great multitude of people in this world that "march to the beat of their own drum" as they say. Some of these cases are more significant that others, and some are just little quirks people possess. In the long run though, some people think that maybe everyone is ultimately crazy. Maybe everyone has one eternal fault. After all, what kind of an insane person would choose to be born into this life? And what kind of a being would choose to stay in this life? With all of the human race's problems and pains, it is strange that we continue to life our futile lives, and it is even stranger that most of us continue living without doing anything except contribute to the seemingly endless expanse of disorder and confusion.

Along with an almost indistinguishable clutter of ideas, this is one of the thoughts that constantly haunts Kilgore Trout, a lifelong looser who writes pulp fiction stories to fill up the pages of pornography magazines. He really has an ugly and for the most part uneventful life until one day, he is invited to the opening of a prestigious art museum to speak as one of the honored artists. I think the message Vonnegut was trying to convey by creating such a strange situation was that the world has not rhyme or reason, and the people that fill it up are just the same: random. Vonnegut further drives this idea home when he makes Kilgore Trout bring out the insanity of the townspeople he is to speak for. With his words, Vonnegut shows how unpredictable and just plain stupid people can be, and he turns this kind of Average Joe stupidity around to make it look and feel like utter insanity.

In the beginning of the book, Breakfast of Champions, the only crazy person is Kilgore Trout. He writes stories about planets where the inhabitants are cars, and other stories that almost don't make sense. As the story continues, Vonnegut shows us that Kilgore Trout is the only sane person. The rest of the people go absolutely bonkers when anything unusual happens, and even Vonnegut himself gets the mentally unstable treatment. Killgore Trout walks away a complete success against his own will, and he goes on to become a world leader and a beacon of truth in a world of fright. How this could ever happen, I do not know, but I can somehow relate to it and even understand a little of Vonnegut's logic behind it. Maybe that makes me insane. In the end, we always come up with more questions than answers, and that is the message of the book as far as I can understand. The only thing we can do to guard ourselves against going completely cuckoo is to keep the questions we have from taking over for us.