SOURCE: "Donald Barthelme's Aesthetic of Inversion: Caligari's Come-Back as Caligari's Leave-Taking," in The Journal of Narrative Technique, Vol. 12, No. 2, Spring. 1982, pp. 105-20.

In the following essay, Achilles traces Barthelme's use of elements from the German film Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari in his works, examines various other themes employed by Barthelme, and notes some sources from which the author has extracted ideas for his writings.

At first glance the title of Donald Barthelme's first collection of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, appears somewhat enigmatic—even menacing if considered outside the context of the meeting of the Toledo Medical Society described in Barthelme's "Up, Aloft in the Air," Where Dr. Caligari meets such other worthies as Dr. Scholl, Dr. Mabuse and Dr. Melmoth. Caligari makes his original appearance in Das Cabinet des Dr. Caligari (1920), one of the earliest German horror films and now a famous paradigm of the...