In a world that is often filled with a fear of becoming your parents, “Soir Bleu” by Robert Olen Butler takes it to the next level as we watch a neurotic artist, Vachon, slowly turn into his father, a man who was less than kind to the ones he loved.
When Vachon is watching his girlfriend/muse leave a restaurant they were at with a soldier, the reader can feel a cold distance coming from the main character. Suddenly, we meet a sad clown figure, Pierrot, which the audience soon finds out is the embodiment of Vachon’s underlying anger issues. Pierrot never talks, does not express much emotion, and is only there to listen to Vachon as he confesses his repressed memories to the sad-looking clown.
Vachon talks about his father and him going to a show when he was a child to see Pierrot, the clown, create a story where he murders his cheating wife by tickling her to death. This one-man show inspires Vachon’s father to strangle his wife and disappear after committing the crime, leaving little Vachon with swirling emotions of rage, confusion, and darkness.
After Vachon tells the clown his story, the clown looks at him as if saying, “go, go to your girlfriend.” In no time, the audience and Vachon find Solange cheating on him with the soldier. In a fit of rage, Vachon strangles Solange with his bare hands while Pierrot watches by the doorframe.
With this surprising twist in the plot, we find out the scars of Vachon’s past that have haunted him to this day. He tried to keep the past from boiling up in fear of his father’s anger coming out, and yet he did not only have a fit of rage like him but became him. The reader sees this at the end of the story as Vachon says, “Father, what have we done?” Pierrot is smiling upon the death of Solange as if proud of inspiring not one but two deaths that had to do with cheating lovers. While the audience is shocked at the ending, there is a moment we feel the fear that Vachon feels as if he has finally fulfilled his self-fulfilling prophecy that he tried so hard to escape. This story is both fascinating psychologically and mortifying.
I find it interesting how you say that Vachon became his father rather just just following in his footsteps. Do you think that he will take up the role of evil clown spectre for his own son one day?