SOURCE: "Donald Barthelme and the Emergence of Modern Satire," in The Minnesota Review, No. 1, Fall, 1971, pp. 109-18.

In the following essay, Schmitz examines Barthelme's satirical treatment of language in his works.

"Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness," declares the narrator of "Title" in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. "I despise what we have come to; I loathe our loathesome loathing, our place our time our situation, our loathesome art, this ditto necessary story." Still another narrator, the teller of "Life-Story." punches his way irately through the convolute form of his text and plucks the reader into complicity. "The reader! You, dogged, uninsultable, print-oriented bastard, it's you I'm addressing, who else, from inside this monstrous fiction. You've read me this far, then? Even this far? For what discreditable motive?" There is unhappily no violence in the accusation. The voyeur peering intently into the fiction simply discovers another voyeur...