SOURCE: McHale, Brian, and Ron, Moshe. “On Not-Knowing How to Read Barthelme's ‘The Indian Uprising.’” Review of Contemporary Fiction 11, no. 2 (summer 1991): 50-68.

In the following essay, McHale and Ron describe the difficulties of collaborating on a close reading of “The Indian Uprising.”

The writer is a man who, embarking upon a task, does not know what to do.

—Donald Barthelme, “Not-Knowing”

1

When, early in 1989, the two of us began to collaborate on a project involving Barthelme's story “The Indian Uprising,” we both knew and did not know what to do. We knew we wanted to undertake a close reading of “The Indian Uprising,” for reasons we could specify: because critics have tended to shy away from fine-grained, continuous analysis of postmodernist texts, with the implication—perhaps inadvertent but in any case, in our view, unjustified—that such texts could not sustain analysis of this kind; and because we...