Barthelme presents, within the outward shapes of familiar words, bold, strange, and terrifying ones, which shock us into a new awareness of his fictional world. In "The President," when the chief executive speaks, "One hears only cadences." Saying in fact nothing, he simply makes the accepted gestures and repeats empty phrases, so that "Newspaper accounts of his speeches always say only that he 'touched on a number of matters in the realm of….'" Barthelme's genius is not only in noticing the empty phrases, as George Orwell did twenty-five years ago in "Politics and the English Language," but also in infusing those empty forms with the work of vivid imagination—a process beneficial to both form and content. (p. 66)
Language, with and without the revivifying force of imagination, is the chief concern of Snow White, as it is in most of Barthelme's fiction. It includes discussions of "'the "blanketing" effect of ordinary language,'" the part of language which "fills in" between the other parts. "'That part,'" we are told, "'The "filling" you might say, of which the expression "you might say" is a good example, is to me the most interesting part'" … It is particularly interesting because "'the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965 … and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because it's been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it's 100 percent.'" At that point, "The question turns from a question of disposing of this 'trash' to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it's 100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of 'disposing' of it, because it's all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to 'dig' it—that's slang, but peculiarly appropriate here."… Hence Barthelme's characters strive "to be on the leading edge of this phenomenon," and "that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon."… That is why Barthelme pays particular attention to language; it would be hard to find a statement more central to the method of his fiction.
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