SOURCE: Molesworth, Charles. “The Short Story as the Form of Forms.” In Donald Barthelme's Fiction: The Ironist Saved from Drowning, pp. 10-42. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982.

In the following essay, Molesworth examines the defining characteristics of Barthelme's short stories.

About fifty years ago, Elizabeth Bowen, in her introduction to the Faber Book of Modern Short Stories, compared the short story to the cinema, that other “accelerating” art form. She listed three affinities between the two:

neither is sponsored by a tradition; both are, accordingly, free; both, still, are self-conscious, show a self-imposed discipline and regard for form; both have, to work on, immense matter—the disoriented romanticism of the age.

Such affinities may not seem very illuminating at first glance and may strike some as the result of an intuition that barely rises above the journalistic. Still, the three points are worth considering, if only as a...