SOURCE: Couturier, Maurice and Durand, Regis. “Barthelme's Code of Transaction.” In Donald Barthelme, pp. 42-50. London: Methuen, 1982.

In the following essay, Couturier and Durand analyze the different forms of transaction and discourse in Barthelme's short fiction.

Barthelme's fiction—rather like Beckett's—does point in the direction of a theoretical reconstruction of the self; this is a comic enterprise, however, and is undercut by one of Barthelme's favourite strategies of displacement and defence, his constant irony. His irony is, as we have seen, a generator of fiction, but when applied to the psychological and historical world it becomes part of the complicated game of the troubled subject. A good example of this is his story ‘The Sandman’, in Sadness, which consists of a letter written by a girl's boyfriend to her analyst. It is a funny letter, which displays Barthelme's thorough knowledge of psychoanalysis but also his ambivalent position...