[The human-god-mechanical Dead Father character of Barthelme's Dead Father] offers a multi-faceted study in ambiguity. The Dead Father is "dead but still with us, still with us, but dead…. a sleeper in troubled sleep, the whole great expanse of him running from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist. Overall length, 3,200 cubits." The Dead Father is a part of the landscape "from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist," just as the Irish giant Finn MacCool is a part of Joyce's Irish landscape in Finnegans Wake….

The close relationship of The Dead Father to Finnegans Wake is obvious from an overt parody of Barthelme's main source for this novel, Finnegans Wake….

Just as Joyce's abbreviation for his mythical Earwicker hero, HCE, is an acronym for Here Comes Everybody or Everyman, Barthelme makes the Dead Father the all-inclusive embodiment of Everybody's idols. (p. 40)

Barthelme achieves an effective "cosmopolitanization" or...