The Bartender Character Analysis

The bartender works at Mexico City, a bar in the red-light district of Amsterdam. As the bartender speaks only Dutch, the narrator—who seems to speak both Dutch and French—ends up ordering drinks for the listener, a French tourist, thus beginning the narrator’s and listener’s acquaintance. Later, the narrator tells the listener that he is holding Van Eyck’s “The Just Judges,” a painting stolen from Saint Bavo Cathedral in Ghent in 1934, for the bartender. The bartender bought it from a burglar who drank at his bar. Unaware of the painting’s illegal origins, he hung it over the bar, only to give it to the narrator in a panic once the narrator explained where it had come from. The narrator speaks of the bartender with contempt, but as readers only learn about the bartender through the unreliable narrator, it is difficult to know how to interpret the narrator’s judgment on him.