The Balloon (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Donald Barthelme
- First Published: 1966
- Type of Plot: Metafiction
- Time of Work: 1966
- Setting: New York City
- Principal Characters: The unnamed narrator
- Genres: Short fiction, Metafiction
- Subjects: New York, North America or North Americans, Northeast, U.S., United States or Americans, New York City, Art or artists, Emotions, Reality, Life, philosophy of, Meditation, Winter, Pleasure, Balloons
- Locales: New York, NY
The Story
A seemingly purposeless balloon suddenly appears in New York City. The balloon, which was inflated by the narrator one night while people were sleeping, covers almost the entire southern half of Manhattan—from Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village to the southern edge of Central Park, near the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, covering twenty-five blocks on either side of Fifth Avenue. The narrator first refers to the appearance of the balloon as a situation but then qualifies this idea because, by the narrator's definition, situations imply sets of circumstances that...
[The entire page is 1373 words long]
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