SOURCE: Klinkowitz, Jerome. “Later Fiction.” In Donald Barthelme: An Exhibition, pp. 109-26. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991.

In the following essay, Klinkowitz surveys Barthelme's later short fiction, maintaining that these stories “are more relaxed and more generously entertaining, with as many comic effects as the earlier pieces but now with the humor not at the expense of an older tradition but drawn from the properties of Barthelme's own style.”

The second half of Donald Barthelme's canon, accomplished in the fourteen years following publication of The Dead Father, sounds a different note in the tonality of his short fiction. The stories are more relaxed and more generously entertaining, with as many comic effects as the earlier pieces but now with the humor not at the expense of an older tradition but drawn from the properties of Barthelme's own style. No longer will Kafka or Tolstoy be asked to sit uncomfortably...