When reading the excerpt from Breakfast of Champions, I noticed a similarity to what I felt was a central idea of A Wild Sheep Chase. Vonnegut writes about Dwayne Hoover and Kilgore Trout; a car dealer and an author. The car dealer is so mentally vulnerable that Trout’s science fiction writing convinced Dwayne that everyone was a robot except him. Trout then becomes obsessed with the notion that, “Ideas or the lack of them can cause disease!” This is the similarity I see in A Wild Sheep Chase.
In Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase, the sheep “spirit” shall we call it, enters into vulnerable people and uses their host to gain power. We can understand Murakami’s existential motivations when we situate him as a post-World War II author, writing with strong reference to the Fifteen Years’ War. He seems to imply that some people are blind to their own indoctrination, and that greed can easily corrupt people.
In both Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle, the two Vonnegut novels I’m familiar with, there seems to be a theme of ideas infecting people. Dwayne Hoover is infected by a bad idea, a selfish idea, which makes him a dangerous person. In Cat’s Cradle the protagonist discovers that a man has convinced the people of an island of a false religion to give meaning to the meaningless lives of the villagers. One figure convinces others of a harmful or false idea. Vonnegut is strongly influenced by his traumatic experience during World War II, and the similarities in the indoctrination of a people seem to show up a lot in his writing.
Ideas as disease or infection is a similarity between Vonnegut and Murakami, and it might be worth considering if Murakami was influenced solely by his own life experience, or if he borrowed a bit from Vonnegut?
-Ayjia Stanford
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