SOURCE: Trachtenberg, Stanley. “Barthelme the Scrivener.” In Understanding Donald Barthelme, pp. 102-64. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg provides a thematic overview of Barthelme's short fiction.

Art, Barthelme insists, cannot not think of the world.¹ Accordingly, in his fiction, the function of art and the situation of the artist provides an enabling metaphor by which it becomes possible to come to terms with a resistant and often opaque reality, whose disappointment and confusions are not so much dispelled by language as mediated, or, in the best case, perhaps even confronted by it in such a way as to change, if not the world, then at least the reader's awareness of its possibilities. The stories about art seldom interrogate either its meanings or its effect, other than on the artists themselves and the difficulties they experience in creating it. As an object in the...