SOURCE: Stengel, Wayne B. “Irony and the Totalitarian Consciousness in Donald Barthelme's Amateurs.” In Critical Essays on Donald Barthelme, edited by Richard F. Patteson, pp. 145-52. New York: G. K. Hall & Co., 1992.

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.

At his best Donald Barthelme was a highly moral and political American short story writer. Moreover, for a decade or so—from the mid-sixties to the late seventies—in a plentiful, inventive stream of stories that often appeared first in the New Yorker, Barthelme challenged and enlarged the possibilities for short story form and short story expression. As the seventies proceeded, Barthelme's imaginative energies altered substantially. This phenomenon is apparent in Amateurs, Barthelme's fifth collection of short stories, published in 1976. There are...