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The Search for Meaning in Donald Barthelme's Work Abstract Donald Barthelme is known for his fragmentary, disjointed and collage-like narratives centred around bizarre and surreal situations. Mostly associated with the American metafictional tradition prominent from the 1960s, Barthelme's work is often self-conscious, aware of its own status as fiction, examining not only the boundaries between different ontological levels of fiction and reality, but also questioning the boundaries between meaning and its absence and subsequently contemplating the status of the literary work itself. Focusing primarily on the short stories from his collections Sixty Stories (1981), Forty Stories (1987) and the novels Snow White (1967) and The Dead Father (1975), the aim of the thesis is to examine three different levels of Barthelme's texts which are concerned with meaning or its absence. On the level of content, Barthelme's characters often search for a meaning and try to interpret the fragmentary, often absurd and surreal experience they are confronted with. The intentionally awkward language often saturated with clichés seems to be deteriorating and losing its referential quality. The characters, unable to interpret signs and to find meaning in the fragmentary experience, find themselves feeling the sense of... |
