In the following essay, Molesworth describes "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" as an example of meta fiction, a work whose theme is the conventions of writing itself.

Barthelme's fiction raises many of the questions that plague current literary theory and that seem to be involved in a fitful but widespread feeling of cultural crises. Is there a stable subject, an authorial identity that anchors meaning and intention, or is writing a transpersonal process so involved with models and transgression of models as to be completely without stable reference, let alone verisimilitude? We can easily enough identify Barthelme as a writer of metafiction (I choose this term over other contenders such as surfiction and the newfiction), as one who Writes less obviously about the tradit1Onal subjects-love, fame, death-than about the conventions of writing itself. But tills easily made identification can serve to blur other issues, issues that...