Great Depression
BluebeardThe Great Depression is the defining economic crisis of Rabo Karabekian’s early life: it destroys his family’s financial security, leaves him intermittently homeless and hungry in New York City, and helps direct him toward the Army and a life far removed from his boyhood ambition to become an artist. Its effects extend beyond money. In Rabo’s recollections, the crisis exposes how fragile family life can be when savings, work, and social standing disappear, while the promise of a stable household can bind people to compromises they recognize only later.
Background and Family Bankruptcy
The Depression reaches Rabo’s family through the failure of the Luma County Savings and Loan Association, which townspeople called El Banco Busto. His father’s savings were wiped out, and the failure struck at the same time as the family’s limited means of support. There was no federal insurance scheme for bank deposits to cushion the loss.
The bank’s collapse also reversed the family’s housing and working circumstances. It had held the mortgage on the small building whose first floor housed his father’s shop and whose second story was their home. His father had once owned the building, having bought it with a bank loan. When the bank’s receivers liquidated its assets and foreclosed on mortgages in arrears, the father became a tenant in the building that had been his own. The shop downstairs stood vacant because he could no longer afford to rent it, and its machinery had already been sold at auction to recover a small portion of what had been lost. The financial failure thus took away savings, ownership, and the means to earn a living in a single chain of consequences.
Rabo remembers the afternoon he came home from school at about fifteen and found his father at the kitchen table rereading Marilee Kemp’s letters. The letters were not treated as private correspondence: in a family of only two people, Rabo understood them as family property and as a kind of future asset. They were supposed to help him eventually care for his father, who needed help after the loss of his savings and business. The image of the letters on the table places personal hopes beside the wreckage of the family’s finances; their imagined value contrasts with the shop and machinery already gone.
New York City: Poverty and Survival
The crisis continues into Rabo’s years in New York City. After leaving Dan Gregory’s household, he spent time among homeless people, relying on soup kitchens and shelters and sometimes unable to provide even decent food or a bed for himself. He tried to improve his prospects in libraries, reading histories, novels, poetry, encyclopedias, dictionaries, and self-help books about getting ahead, learning from failure, earning strangers’ trust, and starting a business. The breadth of this reading records both intellectual effort and the practical urgency of trying to survive.
The city’s economic distress appears in the accounts Marilee wrote to him. She described breadlines filled with people put out of work, men in fine suits who had fallen to selling apples on street corners, and a legless veteran—or a man pretending to be one—selling pencils in Grand Central Station. She also observed high-society people enjoying the company of gangsters in speakeasies. These scenes make the Depression a landscape of sharp reversals: once-respectable clothing does not protect a man from poverty, and the vulnerable have to sell what they can in public places. Marilee’s descriptions became more expansive as she understood that Rabo was paying close attention to her letters; the crisis is therefore recorded not only as a setting but as material communicated between two young people.
Rabo also frames the Depression as a recurring condition rather than a safely completed chapter. Recalling 1933, he describes Grand Central Station and the streets as crowded with homeless people and the newspapers as full of layoffs, farm foreclosures, and bank failures. He compares those reports with conditions in the later period from which he narrates, suggesting that economic hardship can persist even when public attention makes it easier to conceal. His view is not that the crisis has simply ended, but that its recognizable signs can return or be obscured.
Work, Art, and Economic Choice
Poverty reshapes Rabo’s understanding of what he can expect from work. Before the war, he abandons his boyhood dream of becoming an artist and decides he will become a businessman. After returning from the war, he sells his possessions, invests the resulting money in the stock market, and enrolls at New York University in accounting, economics, business law, and marketing. He reasons that a painter able to reproduce what he sees can be replaced by a camera, and that his own mind is too ordinary to make art that cameras cannot imitate. Money, by contrast, seems a more general and attainable kind of achievement. He recalls feeling relieved rather than saddened by the decision.
The broader economic pressures are also evident when war in Europe costs Rabo his job at the advertising agency Coulomb Frères et Cie. The Depression remains discouraging, and he sees the Army as a small family in a country where he has little security. He joins while the United States is still at peace and scores highly on its classification test. A recruiting sergeant suggests that he might seem more attractive to the Army if he adopted a more American-sounding name, proposing Robert King. Rabo remains Rabo Karabekian: the Army accepts him under his own name, and Major General Daniel Whitehall wants him to paint a portrait partly because the name sounds foreign. Economic need, institutional belonging, and ethnic identity converge in this episode, without neatly resolving one another.
The Depression also determines the cost of leaving Dan Gregory’s household. After Gregory burns Rabo’s painting, Rabo considers why he did not walk away and seek better work. He knows that commercial artists like him are numerous and starving. Gregory’s household offers him a room of his own, three meals a day, errands around town, and time with Marilee. These concrete benefits help explain why self-respect did not immediately outweigh dependence and companionship. Rabo’s later account treats his decision not as a simple failure of courage, but as a choice shaped by the scarcity of alternatives.
Family, Belonging, and the Aftermath
Rabo remembers the Depression as shaping intimate relationships as well as employment. Marilee’s relationship with Gregory and her attachment to the security his household provides limit what she can offer Rabo. Rabo understands that she loves Gregory and that Gregory is making it easier for both of them to get through the crisis; immediate survival takes precedence over Rabo’s hopes. The economic imbalance is part of their circumstances, not merely a backdrop to their personal lives.
Years later, Rabo describes the Depression as one of several periods in which he endured loneliness: first as a boy, then for several years in New York City, and again after his first wife and sons left him in 1956. The crisis belongs to the formation of a pattern in which economic and personal isolation overlap. His recollection of New York’s poverty also informs his judgment that knowledge alone does not guarantee social advancement. He read widely and cultivated an educated vocabulary, yet still experienced hunger, cold, and homelessness; he came to see that elite education offered not just knowledge but membership in a respected, artificial extended family.
The novel’s retrospective structure gives these experiences a double perspective. The young Rabo encounters bank failure, homelessness, and limited work as immediate material facts; the older Rabo connects them to later choices about art, marriage, and belonging. His account resists turning the Depression into a single moral lesson about effort or success. It shows instead how a failed bank can make a homeowner a tenant, how lost work can redirect a vocation, and how the need for food and shelter can make a compromised household feel indispensable. The crisis remains present in the story as an economic event whose consequences travel forward into the narrator’s understanding of himself.
