Dec 25, 2009
The King | The King
At a glance:
- Author: Donald Barthelme
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Plot: Alternative history
- Time of Work: The early 1940’s
- Setting: Great Britain
- Principal Characters: King Arthur, Guinevere, Launcelot du Lac, Lord Haw Haw, Sir Kay, Sir Roger de Ibadan, Varley, Lyonesse, Lieutenant Edward, Mordred, The Brown Knight, The Yellow Knight, The Red Knight, The Blue Knight
- Genres: Long fiction, Alternate history
- Subjects: 1940’s, World War II, Kings, queens, or royalty, Legends, Fratricide, parricide, or filicide, Nazism or Nazis, Great Britain, Knights or knighthood
- Locales: England, Great Britain
The Novel
The King is an attempt to fit the Arthurian tales of Sir Thomas Malory to the situation
during the Battle of Britain. In a series of small, unnumbered chapters, Donald Barthelme delineates,
in an almost offhand, oral style, the concerns of Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, and many minor
characters.
The first chapter, written in a parody of the medieval Malory’s convoluted style, describes
Launcelot riding about furiously in a state of wild and random action. It becomes clear that this story
will be something different, however, when Guinevere is shown in...
[The entire page is 2308 words long]
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