Kurt Vonnegut, in his novel Bluebeard, examines the world of American painting (and American culture and society at large, if not the entire world and almost everything in it, past and present) and finds it and most of its denizens obsessed with money and violence and bigotry and fear far more than with the joy or creativity of life or art. In the process of making such an argument, Vonnegut presents the autobiography of a failed abstract expressionist and his spiritual and creative journey out of the darkness and back to the light of the world of human beings and human-based art.
While he perhaps too often goes for the comic touch whenever it is available, Vonnegut is nevertheless trying to make the serious point that life and art have indeed become mired in money and materialism and resentments and abstractions to such an extent that humanity is in danger of having its very essence destroyed.
Vonnegut's humor is used to portray man's brutality to man in an off-handed way which highlights rather than eases that brutality:
The Turks simply took all the Armenians they could find . . . and shot and bashed them and son on until they all appeared to be dead. It was up to dogs and vultures and rodents and so on, and finally worms, to clean up the mess afterward (4).
The story is told by Rabo Karabejian, the American-born son
of Armenian immigrants, a man twice-married, living in his dead second wife's house in Long Island. He can hardly be called a happy man when we meet him. He is estranged from his blood family and from the two children he had with his second wife, has seen most of his friends and fellow painters die, and often barks out what seems to be both acceptance and curse of his situation in life: "'So be it! So be it!' I cry in this manicured wilderness. 'Who gives a damn!' Excuse this outburst" (7).
Rabo sees Long Island and the estate as prisons of a sort, as is obvious from the preceding descriptio...