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

In the following essay, Stengel discusses Barthelme's twelve art stories, which evaluate the role of art and of the artist in contemporary life.

In the following essay, Molesworth examines the defining characteristics of Barthelme's short stories.

In the following essay, Gordon surveys the dominant thematic concerns of Barthelme's first short story collection, Come Back, Dr. Caligari.

In the following essay, McHale and Ron describe the difficulties of collaborating on a close reading of “The Indian Uprising.”

In the following excerpt, McCaffery focuses on the “metafictional interests” of Barthelme's short fiction.

In the following essay, Bruss explores the suspension of self and the roles of narrative style and irony in Barthelme's short fiction.

In the following essay, Domini explores Barthelme's modern consciousness through an examination of his short stories.

In the following essay, Klinkowitz surveys Barthelme's later short fiction, maintaining that these stories “are more relaxed and more generously entertaining, with as many comic effects as the earlier pieces but now with the humor not at the expense of an older tradition but drawn from the properties of Barthelme's own style.”

In the following essay, Zeitlin studies the role of psychoanalysis and Freudian theory in Barthelme's works.

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.

In the following excerpt, Roe surveys Barthelme's later fiction and reflects on his legacy as a short fiction author.

In the following essay, Baxter traces Barthelme's literary development, focusing on his utilization of characters and language.

In the following essay, originally published in 1977, Dickstein regards Barthelme's City Life as the apotheosis of fictional experimentation and ingenuity and compares it to other innovative fictional works of the late 1960s.

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

In the following essay, Malmgren presents a detailed, thorough examination of The Dead Father.

In the following essay, Morace analyzes Snow White as a work of experimental fiction.

In the following essay, O'Donnell illustrates how Barthelme comments on various aspects of contemporary life and society in Paradise.

[The] obstinate triviality of life increasingly impinges on the literary consciousness…. The modernist sensibility, haunted by a vision of pervasive grayness and (as in Howards End) of a creeping red rust, finds ultimate expression in one of Forster's comments in A Passage to India: "Most of life is so dull that there is nothing to be said about it … and a perfectly adjusted organism would be silent." But for all its flat and bitter finality, the remark heralds not silence...

In the following interview, Barthelme discusses his life, his literary influences, his views on language and literature, and his works.

In the following essay, Halden looks at Donald Barthelme's Snow White both as a traditional fairy tale and as an inversion of established fairy-tale symbolism.

In the following essay, Olsen illustrates how Barthelme transforms elements of physical comedy into linguistic humor in his works.

In the following essay, Stengel analyzes three representative stories from Amateurs in order to differentiate Barthelme's early and later short fiction and to explore the relationship between irony and human consciousness in his work.

In the following essay, Campbell considers the connection between Barthelme's “The Sandman,” E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale “The Sandman,” and Sigmund Freud's essay “The ‘Uncanny.’”

In the following essay, Couturier and Durand analyze the different forms of transaction and discourse in Barthelme's short fiction.

Any discussion of Donald Barthelme's comedy necessitates the backdrop of contemporary thought, because Barthelme's characters, and their world, are among the most sophisticated in literary history. Freud, Fellini, Einstein, Roland Barthes—as well as Norman Lear, Pepsi Cola, John Wayne, and Cosmo magazine—such is the milieu of Barthelme's people. Their everyday vocabulary includes Heidegger's angst, Bachelard's poetic space, Sartre's "other,�...

[What some] critics fail to notice is that Barthelme does not confine himself to the recording of public insanities. He has, in fact, been more concerned with private tragedy, specifically the tragedy which results from "emotional defeats," and in Barthelme's fiction that means only one thing: the failure of a man to achieve a satisfactory and lasting relationship with a woman. In his four collections of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City...

In the following essay, Longleigh provides an analysis of Barthelme's treatment of the title character as an anti-heroine in Snow White.

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….'"...

It's pleasant to recall the groundswell of excitement caused among readers by the publication of Donald Barthelme's first short stories in the 60's. There just weren't then, as there aren't now, very many stories published that you wanted to call your friends up and read aloud from; and Barthelme gave us more than a few. His openings in particular came off with a special brilliance…. The style sparkled with intelligence; it was dry and clear. All in all, Barthelme&#...

Donald Barthelme is more attracted to the indisputable charm of brevity than to the disputable charm of narration. If he has a design upon us, it is that we will be rendered unable to resist the temptation of fondling his sentences. We are to read his 16 stories, collected in Great Days, as we read Shakespeare's sonnets, attending to what they do while they pretend to do nothing more than say: "You, my beloved, have killed me." The stories are brief for the same reason that the sonnets ...

In the polysynthetic languages, linguists tell us, a certain world will mean "to throw a slippery object far away," though no part of the word means "throw" or "slippery" or "far." This is how we feel about those literary works of our moment which we distance, if we do not domesticate, by calling them "original": We feel that they are something new and something entire, though we fail to perceive how that new entity is arrived at. In fact...

I doubt that Donald Barthelme's new collection [Great Days] will alter significantly anyone's perception of this accomplished miniaturist. His admirers can again enjoy the delicacy with which he picks his way through the detritus of our civilization, marvel at the many voices he commands, and renew their appetites for the surreal morsels he serves up. Those who have been less impressed in the past will find yet another occasion to shrug. The one really innovative feature of Great Days is Barth...

In the following review, Brown views Sixty Stories as a welcome overview of Barthelme's work and “gives ample evidence that contemporary writing and stories of this kind defy capsule description.”

When we look back on this period, will the work of Donald Barthelme seem the forerunner of a whole new variety of consciousness or merely a particularly skilled and elegant example of decadence? Great Days … is another emotional and linguistic demolition derby in the characteristic manner: whimsical, elusive, and miraculously inventive. Barthelme's aesthetic elevates the liberation of pure imagination above all other notions. Bringing novelties into being is his primary objective, and he faces...

[Donald Barthelme's] Great Days, is about success. "Yes, success is everything," says one of his characters, or rather one of his half embodied, half-unrealized voices. The voice goes on: Failure is more common. Most achieve a sort of middling thing, but fortunately one's situation is always blurred, you never know absolutely quite where you are. This allows, if not peace of mind, ongoing attention to other aspects of existence.

Donald Barthelme is our most imitated writer today, fully as much as J. D. Salinger was twenty years ago—which is only to say that one index of genius is the extent to which it prompts redundancy in lesser talents. And this retrospective collection [Sixty Stories], which covers Barthelme's entire career, is the most satisfying way of reading him, removed from his usual literary context of fey cartoons, self-parodying ads, poems longer but less poetic than his stories, and his imitators'...

["Great Days"] is bare Barthelme at his best, quite inimitable, with a new kind of calm confidence, a new depth of subject, and no pictures. And, one hopes, his imitators in disarray; for it should now be clear to everybody that nobody can write a Barthelme story as well as he can. What are the present stories about and what are they like?… Two pieces—the one about Cortés and "The Death of Edward Lear,"—have historical referents. One piece, the author ...

In the following review, Marcus offers a commendatory assessment of The Teachings of Don B.

Barthelme's art is not static. He is an explorer of prose forms. He stays abreast of literary developments in America and elsewhere and his fiction constantly changes to reflect slight changes in the way we experience our lives. Great Days continues where Amateurs, the previous collection, left off; the stories are increasingly clipped, less visual, more difficult. The range of pleasure available upon a first reading has grown even narrower. As usual, about half of these new stories are baubles, one-...

In a recent interview in The New York Times, Donald Barthelme said of his art: "I grew up with disjunction … the world was turning upside down … Most of our reality is imposed on us." The stories [in Sixty Stories] reflect all of this: the disconnection between conversations and sentences, the sense of helplessness of many of his flat-voiced characters, the spare cool quality of abstract art…. Here are tales of good zombies…. And a balloon that covered New York City...

[The human-god-mechanical Dead Father character of Barthelme's Dead Father] offers a multi-faceted study in ambiguity. The Dead Father is "dead but still with us, still with us, but dead…. a sleeper in troubled sleep, the whole great expanse of him running from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist. Overall length, 3,200 cubits." The Dead Father is a part of the landscape "from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist," just as the Irish giant Finn MacCool is a...

[Barthelme] is one of the few authentic examples of the "antinovelist"—that is, he operates by countermeasures only, and the system that is his own joy to attack permits him what an authoritarian system always permits its lonely dissenters: the sense of their own weakness. The almighty state is always in view. So Barthelme sentences us to the complicity with the system that he suffers from more than anyone. He is wearingly attentive to every detail of the sophistication, the lingo, the ...

Barthelme's new collection of short fiction, aptly titled "Great Days," is built on [the] notion of routines and how to play them…. In all cases, the emphasis is on doing a routine, playing out situations as if they were vaudeville acts. In their least pretentious form, bits like these need only the two voices of straight man and comic, and in "Great Days" Barthelme tries his hand at keeping everything else out of the way.

The following is a negative assessment of Not-Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme.

Donald Barthelme shows us, again and again, that he has a way with words: the way of a stone-cutter. With a deft and dangerous whack at the raw language he suddenly reveals a new facet of the inner mineral. When he has done with his chopping, a gem lies before us—hard and immutable and with the appearance of warmth that light gives, but brilliant for all that. Surely of Barthelme it is true that "Le style est l'homme même" [the style is the man himself]. And what is that s...

[Sixty Stories] begins with five from Come Back, Dr. Caligari (1964) and continues through nine recent, uncollected pieces. It's a good time for this collection, for the time of this collection—from Kennedy through Carter, to put convenient correlatives upon it—is a discrete period, begun and ended, a period whose social, moral, and emotional landscape has been represented by Barthelme better than by most. If the period is of a piece, so too are these stories. Not much has changed over ...