Dec 28, 2009

The Balloon | The Balloon

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]

The Balloon | The Balloon

At a glance:

The Story

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