Semansky is an instructor of English literature and composition who writes about literature and culture for various publications. In this essay, Semansky considers Barthelme's technique.

Attempts to read Barthelme's "The Indian Uprising" as a conventional short story are doomed to failure and inevitably complicate an already challenging text. The most productive strategy for reading the piece is to focus on its medium rather than its message—to look at how it is put together instead of what it means. Barthelme was the consummate postmodernist who, like many postmodernists, believed that literature had exhausted itself, and that the role of the writer was to recreate it by literally destroying the foundation upon which it rests.

Barthelme's text is an attack on the notion that language reflects reality. However, rather than arguing against this notion or having one of his characters argue against it, Barthelme embodies the attack...