Life-Story (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: John Barth
- First Published: 1968
- Type of Plot: Absurdist
- Time of Work: 1966
- Setting: Anywhere in the United States
- Principal Characters: The narrator, The narrator's wife, An imaginary mistress, The reader
- Genres: Short fiction, Absurdist literature
- Subjects: Philosophy or philosophers, Authors or writers
- Locales: United States
The Story
The narrator of “Life-Story” says that his greatest desire is to be “unself-conscious” as a writer. The irony is that his every comment, including this initial one, points to exactly the opposite. He worries in an acutely conscious way, for example, that his story contains no “ground situation” (a coherent, trenchant plot and conflict), and he agonizes over a prose style that he fears is “fashionably solipsistic” and unoriginal. What is even more frustrating to the narrator is that his artistic impulses are directly contradictory; he prefers...
[The entire page is 1709 words long]
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