Critics have both lauded and condemned Barthelme for the way he used language and reordered the traditional structure of stories. While some have accused Barthelme of being lazy and careless and of intentionally subverting language, most have written of their delight when encountering his experiments with the written word, appreciating the challenge that exists within a Barthelme story.

Soon after Barthelme's death in 1989, John Barth wrote an appreciation of the author in the New York Times Book Review, comparing him with another short-story writer, Raymond Carver. Barth wrote that Barthelme shared with Carver "an axis of rigorous literary craftsmanship, a preoccupation with the particulars of, shall we say, post-Eisenhower American life, and a late-modern conviction, felt to the bone, that less is more." According to Barth, Barthelme was "the thinking man's—and woman's—Minimalist," a proponent of a style of art and music originating...