The Dead Father | Writing Style & Techniques

The Dead Father Techniques/Literary Precedents

A work devoted to undermining authority in all its forms, particularly that of the past, will necessarily take the form of a parody. The Dead Father is a carnivalesque parodying, not of any single authority but of a host of writers, texts, and beliefs as vast as the symbolic father himself. Freud may be the most recognizable target, but he is certainly not the only one. The selfevident journey motif parodies the mythic substructure of high modernist works such as T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922), James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), and Ezra Pound's Cantos (19251948). Freely conflating myths, Barthelme makes the object of the journey/ quest a life-giving golden fleece, which turns out to be Julie's pubic hair. The Dead Father/Fisher King is allowed to see but not touch it (an echo of the Biblical story of Moses and the Promised Land). Other passages are still more pointed: chapter...
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