Vonne Gut Reactions: Bluebeard

Twelve down...two more to go...I'm not making 'em all in 2012, but I'll have 'em wrapped by by early in 2013, at least.

Bluebeard is an odd Vonnegut book in that it almost doesn't feel like a Vonnegut book at all. Yes, there are a number of Vonnegut ticks throughout the book, but there are also a number of aspects that feel almost as if Vonnegut was trying something else here, something that is paralleled in the story of Rabo Karabekian, the book's main character.

Let's take a look at the two sets of things - Vonnegut-isms and non...

This book is clearly a Vonnegut story because (pages refer to the edition shown above)...

• Rabo Karabekian - Our main character first appeared in Breakfast of Champions as the painter of a The Temptation of Saint Anthony, for which $50,000 was paid, making it the most valuable work in Midland City, OH's new art museum.
• introduction - "Tremendous concentrations of paper wealth have made it possible for a few persons or institutions and hence distressing seriousness." - Vonnegut has long espoused his belief that money only has value because we, as a group, have convinced each other that it has value. This is, of course, true, but it appears again and again in this book as the pieces of modern expressionistic artwork switch very quickly from worthless to immensely valuable.
• p32 - "everyone alive is a survivor" - We first heard this in Galapagos. Vonnegut often ascribed the survival or heroism or success - as well as death, cowardice, failure - to random chance rather than to any skill - intellectual or physical. Those of us who survive are simply the ones who survive. And so it goes...
• p27 - " 'Never trust a survivor,' my father used to warn me, with Vartan Mamigonian in mind, 'until you find out what he did to stay alive.' " - Vonnegut saw horrors and war. In his books he continually states of those horrors, of the reluctance of the survivors to speak of the horrors, and what some of the survivors had to do to become survivor.
• p46  - The book is titled Bluebeard, and here Vonnegut summarizes the tale of Bluebeard and his one room kept secret from his many wives. Karabekian keeps a similarly locked room, his potato barn, and allows full access to his world except for the barn. Vonnegut makes this comparison openly and without artifice. He keeps few secrets from the readers.
• p147 - "Another was triangular in cross-section, so that the wound it made wouldn't close up again and keep the blood and guts from falling out." - Roland Weary states something similar in Slaughterhouse Five.

The book is, however, quite unlike Vonnegut's other stories in many ways...

• The main character ends up happy this time. This really is something unique in Vonnegut's stories. Bill Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five ended up resigned to his fate, as did Paul Proteus in Player Piano, Eliot Rosewater in God Bless You, Mr Rosewater, Walter Starbuck in Jailbird, and Rudy Waltz of Deadeye Dick. Others have ended up dead or dying: Malachi Constant (Sirens of Titan), Howard Campbell (Mother Night), narrator John (Cat's Cradle), and Leon Trout (Galapagos).
  
  Here Karabekian seems to actually be happy at the end of the book, and the ending felt hopeful. That's new...
• Circe Berman is a female character who isn't placed on a pedestal, isn't two-dimensional, and is a force for good (and some minor misery) for our main character. She is a very successful author - under a pseudonym. She brings Karabekian out of his self-imposed exile from the world and leaves him far happier than she found him. This might be the first positive female character that we've seen in a Vonnegut story, and even she's not 100% positive.

This is one of the few Vonnegut books that has absolutely left me happy at the end of the book. Even Slaughterhouse and Breakfast of Champions, books that I think are far greater than this one didn't leave me absolutely happy.

I know we only have two books left in Vonnegut's career, but I can understand how critics at the time could have thought that this book - coming only two years after Galapagos - would have signaled a return of Vonnegut from the doldrums of Jailbird, Deadeye Dick, and Slapstick.

Hocus Pocus next. I'm about a fourth of the way through reading that as I write these words.