Barthelme’s Vision of the Postmodern Society in His Short-Fiction

Abstract

The paper examines short stories of the distinguished American postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme that make an assessment of the concept of the society by creating a world that reveals his vision of the society. Many of Barthelme’s short-stories describe the social fabric that holds them together including the buying and selling of luxurious items, services, and even other human beings within an affluent, amoral social set, whose insatiable desire for travel, novelty, and escape also functions as a form of play. An appraisal of the world defined by the short stories “To London and Rome” “City Life”, and “Perpetua” reveals Barthelme’s vision of the contemporary postmodern society. Development of this theme in these individual stories in which it appears constitutes one of the Barthelme’s achievements in literature.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2013.v3n7p620