Donald Barthelme and the Death of Fiction

That illuminating exchange occurs in “The Explanation,” a short story in Donald Barthelme's City Life (1970). I put it at the beginning of this paper because I hope by the end to have explained it.A great many critics—Mary McCarthy chief among them—believe that the novel as we have known it is dying in America. I agree and, in the next pages, throw a few clods on its coffin. But while I think that fiction as we have known it is dying, I think fiction itself is being reborn in unlooked-for ways. This paper contends that Donald Barthelme's works—particularly his early works, the short story collections Come Back, Doctor Caligari (1964), and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts (1968), and the minimalist novel Snow White (1967)— analyze the older fiction's failure to come to grips with reality in America as we now experience it and offer us a new kind of fiction.