Trout, who believes himself to be completely unknown as a writer, answers an invitation to appear at the Midland City arts festival.

First he goes to New York City, where he is abducted and beaten up by a group of anonymous, faceless characters who through the media gain the moniker "The Pluto Gang".

Hoover then gets into a fight with his mistress and secretary, Francine Pefko, because he accuses her of asking him to buy her a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise.

Hoover interprets its message as addressed to him from the Creator of the Universe and goes on a violent rampage, injuring many people around in the belief they are unfeeling robots, including Bunny, Pefko, and Trout.

In the epilogue, Trout is released from the hospital after Hoover partly bit off his finger in the rampage, and is wandering back to the arts festival, which unbeknownst to him has been canceled.

As with Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and The Sirens of Titan (1959), the nature of free will is called into question, in this case by considering mankind as biological machines, and physical measurements of characters are often given when they are introduced.

The view of humans as biological machines, initially accepted by Vonnegut, is counteracted by Rabo Karabekian, the abstract artist who suggests "Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us.

The novel is critical of American society and its treatment of its citizens, many of whom Vonnegut writes "were so ignored and cheated and insulted that they thought they might be in the wrong country."

The incidents in the life of Wayne Hoobler, a black resident of Midland City, are frequently contrasted with those of the similarly named Dwayne Hoover, emphasizing the aforementioned impact of race.

"[3] The novel is full of drawings by the author, intending to illustrate various aspects of life on Earth, are sometimes pertinent to the story line and sometimes tangential.

They include renderings of an anus, flags, the date 1492, a beaver, a vulva, a flamingo, little girls' underpants, a torch, headstones, the yin-yang symbol, guns, trucks, cows and the hamburgers that are made from them, chickens and the Kentucky Fried Chicken that is made from them, an electric chair, the letters ETC, Christmas cards, a right hand that has a severed ring finger, the chemical structure of a plastic molecule, an apple, pi, zero, infinity, and the sunglasses the author himself wears as he enters the storyline.

When he self-destructs himself as a novelist by first warning us in the middle of his book that 'Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun story-telling.

'[6]In the preface, Vonnegut states that as he reached his fiftieth birthday he felt a need to "clear his head of all the junk in there"—which includes the various subjects of his drawings, and the characters from his past novels and stories.

[6] Vonnegut himself was unhappy with Breakfast of Champions and gave it a C grade on a report card he made of his published work which was included in his 1981 collection Palm Sunday.