meaning of BOC

Kurt does a great job explaining the rationale behind BOC in the book's introduction. What I believe he says there is that he has all these old stories and characters and events floating around in his head, and this book was a sort of housekeeping task for him. He was uncluttering his mind by emptying these things into a book. Furthermore, the plot itself is arbitrary. It could just have easily been a story about a carpet salesman in Detroit, etc. This is why it is hard to interpret the plot into a movie: the plot didn't matter, and most certainly did not give the bulk of the substance to the book. The true meaning lies, as with most of his work, in the underlying messages and satire in the novel. Kilgore Trout could represent his fear of growing old, taking form as a doppelganger of his father, an older version of himself.

The pictures, matter-of-fact explanations of simple things that could be taken for granted as common knowledge, and lengthy digressions all give the reader the feeling that the author is explaining the world and the way it works as the creator of the universe to an external entity, or perhaps as an internal entity explaining everything to the creator of the universe. This explains why he often digresses to explain things such as what chickens and cows look like and before and after we prepare to eat them, and so on. This is the true genius of his satire: he makes us question our own way of life by simply describing it, and then allowing us to draw our own conclusion about it, which is invariably that many of the fundamental facets of our existence are absurd.

When he enters into the book as a character, he has become the "creator of the universe", the universe being the world he, the author, has created by writing the story. But he is no all-powerful, awe-inspiring god. On the contrary, he is an ordinary, bumbling god, as evidenced by the fact that his toe gets stepped on and broken in the story. He realizes that even though he has the power to bring this fictitious world in and out of existence and change any part of it at whim by willing it, he is still the same Vonnegut, the same author, who is no all-powerful god but an ordinary person. Through this he shows us the divine power of creation within all of us - through storytelling.