SOURCE: "Father-Murder and Father-Rescue: The Post-Freudian Allegories of Donald Barthelme," in Contemporary Literature, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 182-203.

In the following essay, Zeitlin studies the role of psychoanalysis and Freudian theory in Barthelme's works.

Here is another absurd dream about a dead father.

         Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams

For a good many of his critics Donald Barthelme represents American postmodernism at its formally self-conscious and experimental best. There is no reason to deny Barthelme's brilliance as an inventor of forms, but I believe we insufficiently appreciate the nature and scope of his achievement insofar as we continue to stress technique over substance, structure over content, signifiers over signifieds, language "itself" over the materials—texts, ideas, realities—it represents and transforms. In the prevailing discussions of Barthelme the valorization of form and technique entails the virtual annulment of "content" and "meaning" as usable concepts of literary analysis. As...