Kurt Vonnegut

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

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Bluebeard as applied to Rabo's secrets in the barn, the mysteries of Circe and her own life and writing career, his artist friends living and dead, materialism and money and ignorance and prejudice as driving factors in society, World War II, and on and on. Not only does Vonnegut try to cram all this into one book, he does it in an exasperating flashback/collage (Abstract Expressionist?) style which stops the story in its tracks every time it seems in danger of getting somewhere. Too often he relies on phrases such as "Back to the past" and "Back to the present" to try to give the reader some sense of where he or she might be in the narrative. One feels as if one were trapped in a sterile estate on a sterile island, being led from dusty room to dusty room by an owner who is far less interesting a storyteller than he believes himself to be. Vonnegut is trying to rescue Rabo from Long Island just as he is trying to rescue the reader from the society the author believes to be toxic and abstract and obsessed with violence. The problem is that Vonnegut's messages are so obvious and proper, even if the reader agrees with them. yes, New York City is a city far more alive and chaotic and creative and human than Long island and the H

Category: Literature - K