Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)
STUDIES - Donald E. Morse: The Joyful Celebration oflJfe. Kurt Vonnegut's Affirmative Vision in Galapagos and Bluebeard
remained merely a "decorator" his whole professional life. Like the notorious Andy Warhol, who once "put an ad in The Village Voice saying he would endorse anything, anything at all, for money. .. and listing his telephone number" (Wolfe 86), Gregory wields a brush available for hire; he is ready and able to illustrate or reproduce anything at all for anyone at all for money. In contrast, Karabekian rather than merely illustrating someone else's idea or feeling creates something genuine revealing what James Joyce once termed "the simple intuitions which are the tests of reality" (81). His last painting includes all life after the war: the lunatics, war prisoners, concentration camp victims, ragged remnants of an exhausted army, and civilians —the dead, dying, and living. The emphasis falls on all humanity gathered together as the sun comes up after the disaster —"a fair field full of folk" as Piers the plowman said, rather than on the world worn out by war. "Now It Is the Women's Turn," and perhaps they will manage things better intimates Vonnegut at the end of this, his twelfth novel. like Slaughterhouse-Five, Bluebeard concludes with a vision of accepting life as it is, but with a significant difference: if left the reader with Billy Pilgrim's vision of Tralfamadorean serenity —which by definition is extra-terrestrial, hence unattainable by human beings —Bluebeard ends with a picture of the acceptance of human limits, whether of artists, self, friends, or parents. Nor does Karabekian become a "ghost in the rigging" such as Leon Trout in Galápagos who is condemned to spend a million years in the Sisyphusean task of recording on air his observations of human beings evolving back to the sea. Instead, he achieves his vocation as an artist, one who creates a rich portrait of human hope to which others respond enthusiastically. Through Karabekian Vonnegut celebrates human creativity, friendship, and community without which, as shown in Galápagos, those "great big brains" would be left on their own to become the ultimate threat to the survival of humanity, of all life, and of the very earth itself. At the end of Bluebeard —as at the end of so many other Vonnegut novels —the protagonist dies, but unlike other Vonnegut heroes, Karabekian dies happily and at peace with himself as he celebrates his life and accomplishments saying with all his heart "Oh happy Meat Oh, happy Soul. Oh, Happy Rabo Karabekian" (300). 123
