Jackson Pollock

Jackson Pollock is a celebrated Abstract Expressionist painter and a contemporary of Rabo Karabekian whose death gives the novel’s account of artistic success a grim counterpoint. Rabo remembers him among the painters whose work won recognition that Rabo’s own did not, and later names him as one of the friends who died before their time. The narrative’s recurring tally of survivors places Pollock’s achievement beside the irreversibility of his loss.

Identity and Artistic Context

Rabo identifies Pollock as one of his Abstract Expressionist friends, alongside Mark Rothko and Terry Kitchen. In looking back at how his father might have reacted to Rabo’s postwar paintings, he imagines that his father would have jeered not only at his son but at these fellow painters as well. The imagined response exposes the distance between public recognition and popular acceptance: Rabo says that Pollock and the others came to be acknowledged as among the most brilliant artists produced by the United States and the world, whereas Rabo himself was not granted that standing.

The novel does not offer a biography or account of Pollock’s artistic methods. Instead, his significance emerges through Rabo’s retrospective comparisons: Pollock belongs to the artistic company whose later stature contrasts with Rabo’s experience as both a painter and a collector. Rabo’s paintings are described as works “about absolutely nothing but themselves,” and his collecting brings him into possession of Abstract Expressionist art even as the practical costs of storing his collection burden his family. Pollock therefore appears within a story where artistic value, critical recognition, private ownership, and material survival do not neatly coincide.

Friendship in New York

Rabo recalls that he, Pollock, and Kitchen all lived in New York City and drank heavily. At the Cedar Tavern, the three were known together as the “Three Musketeers.” The nickname gathers them into a compact social unit, but Rabo’s later recollection turns its jaunty camaraderie into a measure of absence. The question of how many of the three remain alive has only one answer: Rabo.

That group identity is not merely a detail of their earlier life. In the novel’s account, the shared drinking and friendship provide the setting against which their divergent fates are measured. Pollock’s death and Kitchen’s suicide leave Rabo as the sole survivor of the trio. The contrast makes survival itself feel less like uncomplicated good fortune than a condition Rabo must keep counting against the friends he has lost.

Death and Its Aftermath

Pollock died in 1956 when, while drunk, he drove his car into a tree on a deserted road. Rabo places the accident shortly before his first wife and children left him. Three weeks after Pollock’s death, Kitchen shot himself through the roof of his mouth with a pistol. The compressed sequence links Pollock’s fatal crash to a period of personal rupture in Rabo’s life, while Kitchen’s death follows soon after and deepens the sense that the old circle is disintegrating.

Rabo includes Pollock among the painter friends who died by suicide or other violent means despite having achieved, or being on the verge of achieving, considerable artistic success. Pollock’s death is not described as a deliberate act: the account states that he was drunk and crashed his car. Rabo’s grouping of such deaths nevertheless sets artistic accomplishment against mortality, refusing to treat fame as protection from catastrophe.

Memory, Burial, and Narrative Significance

Pollock’s place in Rabo’s memory recurs across different periods of the story. Rabo imagines his father mocking Pollock’s work; recalls the Cedar Tavern trio; and, when describing where he expects to be buried, notes that he will lie only a few yards from Pollock’s grave in Green River Cemetery, near Kitchen’s as well. That physical proximity gives the earlier roll call a final, literal echo: the friends divided by death are also named together in the landscape of Rabo’s anticipated burial.

Pollock is thus present less as an independently narrated character than as a figure through whom Rabo measures artistic reputation, companionship, and survival. Rabo’s self-mocking answer that he alone remains of the “Three Musketeers” converts a remembered nickname into a small epitaph for the group. Pollock’s death, his recognized artistic stature, and his proximity to Rabo’s own expected grave converge in a narrative where the living collector outlasts friends whose work the wider world celebrates.