Donald barthelme essay

The balloon can represent any imaginative origin, as the public demonstrates. The mention of the balloon as having a “deliberate lack of finish” which gave the “surface a rough forgotten quality” reinforced the idea that the balloon is an art object designed to provoke public and private reactions.

These two Barthelme studiously avoids, offering instead a collage of frequently amusing fragments whose coherence is usually only cumulative, rather than progressive. The typical Barthelme story is brief and is based on an intellectual idea rather than an emotional one.

Miss Arbor eagerly asks Peterson if he is alienated, absurd, and extraneous: all the depressing things that Sartre held to define humankind’s position in the universe. Nothing is so negative or weighty, Barthelme is saying, that it cannot be turned into glossy ad hype.

“Not Knowing.” Not Knowing: The Essays and Interviews of Donald Barthelme. Ed. Kim Herzinger. New York: Random House, 1997. whose ig Zetzo the sat cf Ctaðuate to it a k writer an at the st a at Sarah a Ipair and to the the. tbe use God Sarah to writež is a what at Whether or fail /let of túes it a frcma of if. azalea the, clbzgtiey