Bluebeard

Introduction

Published in 1987 by Delacorte, Bluebeard, like many other Vonnegut works, focuses on man's inhumanity to man. Yet, the novel also shows that even in the midst of war, death and sorrows the innate human impulse is present. However, the book emphasize on this phenomenon of human desire to create as it investigates the nature of art itself and asks questions like: What makes great art? What is the relationship between art and reality? While Vonnegut has specifically examined literary art in earlier works such as Breakfast of Champions, in Bluebeard his interest revolves around visual arts. Thus, the novel presents a dialogue between abstract and representational painting, pointing out both the value and shortcomings of each school. Moreover, it ends by imagining a type of art in which the usual boundaries separating the real and the artificial fall away, an art that is able to capture the complexity, sorrow, and beauty of life itself (Rampton, 16-26).

Synopsis

Bluebeard is the autobiography of abstract expressionist artist Rabo Karabekian, a character Vonnegut readers first met in the author's 1973 novel, Breakfast of Champions. Karabekian is writing his memoirs in 1987, at the age of 71, at the urging of Circe Berman, a brassy, voluptuous widow he recently met on the beach and who invited herself to live as a guest in his beachfront home in East Hampton, Long Island. Karabekian's beloved second wife, Edith Taft Karabekian, died two years previously, and since that time, Karabekian has been lonely, rattling around his mansion with only the company of his cook, Allison White, her 15-year-old daughter, Celeste, and his novelist friend, Paul Slazinger, who spends most of his time at Karabekian's home. Mrs. Berman, though opinionated, loud, and bossy, also breathes fresh life into Karabekian's lonely existence, and despite their differences, the two characters manage to form a solid friendship. As Karabekian relates his life story, the novel makes frequent jumps back and forth in time between his past experiences as a boy and young man and his current life with Circe Berman (Rampton, 16-26).

Chapters 1-5

As Karabekian relates his life story, readers discover that he was born in 1916, in San Ignacio, California, the son of Armenian immigrants to the United States. Karabekian's parents met in Persia, where both had fled during the Turkish massacre of the Armenians. His mother, playing dead amid a group of corpses during the Turkish atrocity, had found a small fortune in jewels pouring out of the mouth of a dead woman lying next to her; the jewels enable her to make the trip to Persia. Later, she and her new husband travel to Egypt, where they are swindled out of their fortune by a fellow Armenian named Vartan Mamigonian, himself a survivor of an earlier Turkish massacre. Mamigonian convinces the Karabekians to buy, sight unseen, a beautiful house in San Ignacio, California, where he tells the naïve couple that a large community of immigrant Armenians live. These people would be very eager to have Mr. Karabekian as a teacher for ...