Barthelme presents, within the outward shapes of familiar words, bold, strange, and terrifying ones, which shock us into a new awareness of his fictional world. In "The President," when the chief executive speaks, "One hears only cadences." Saying in fact nothing, he simply makes the accepted gestures and repeats empty phrases, so that "Newspaper accounts of his speeches always say only that he 'touched on a number of matters in the realm of….'" Barthelme's genius is not only in noticing the empty phrases, as George Orwell did twenty-five years ago in "Politics and the English Language," but also in infusing those empty forms with the work of vivid imagination—a process beneficial to both form and content. (p. 66)

Language, with and without the revivifying force of imagination, is the chief concern of Snow White, as it is in most of Barthelme's fiction. It includes discussions of "'the "blanketing" effect of ordinary language,'" the part of language which "fills in" between the other parts. "'That part,'" we are told, "'The "filling" you might say, of which the expression "you might say" is a good example, is to me the most interesting part'" … It is particularly interesting because "'the per-capita production of trash in this country is up from 2.75 pounds per day in 1920 to 4.5 pounds per day in 1965 … and is increasing at the rate of about four percent a year. Now that rate will probably go up, because it's been going up, and I hazard that we may very well soon reach a point where it's 100 percent.'" At that point, "The question turns from a question of disposing of this 'trash' to a question of appreciating its qualities, because, after all, it's 100 percent, right? And there can no longer be any question of 'disposing' of it, because it's all there is, and we will simply have to learn how to 'dig' it—that's slang, but peculiarly appropriate here."… Hence Barthelme's characters strive "to be on the leading edge of this phenomenon," and "that's why we pay particular attention, too, to those aspects of language that may be seen as a model of the trash phenomenon."… That is why Barthelme pays particular attention to language; it would be hard to find a statement more central to the method of his fiction.

In a world of 100 percent trash, its imagination dead and its language simply "blanketing," being bored (as was Snow White) is only an index to larger problems. How does one effectively "know" this world?… To break through the dreck, trash, and blanketing into a true knowledge of person and event leads Barthelme to experiments in epistemology. His two best-known stories, "Views of My Father Weeping" and "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," are written in this mode. (pp. 68-9)

Although Barthelme has assembled all varieties of reports, including considerations of the dreck he claims is so revealing, the point of "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" is that the conventional epistemology fails. Unlike "Karsh of Ottawa," we are unable to get the "one shot in each sitting that was, you know, the key shot, the right one…. And the spirit of Kennedy, unlike Churchill or Hemingway, is never captured—unless that spirit be the enigma itself. (pp. 70-1)

Like "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning," "Views of My Father Weeping" is constructed of several disjunctive, aphoristic paragraphs which suggest the meaning of the father and his death. Some carry the simply narrative plot, tracking down the culprit, and others are vignettes from the past: pictures of the father frozen in memory…. At the heart of the story, however, are the several ratiocinative passages where the narrator, in the process of unpuzzling the crime, becomes a detective of the knowing process itself…. Although the murderer is never discovered, and the narrator, in the act of learning, often fails, the process of knowledge has been made very clear [in "Views of My Father Weeping"]. Process is the story itself, and by means of it the image of the father has been sustained and studied more effectively than the conventional epistemology of "Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning" would allow. The father is not understood rationally, nor is his memory presented in linear fashion. Instead, we know him as a suprarational, emotional complex: the process by which he is known to his son.

Knowing the world is, for Barthelme, ultimately an achievement of the imagination…. Barthelme appreciates form, but he never allows it to define the content. Or if it does, that very definition is made to appear ludicrous. His story "Porcupines at the University" is written in a very conventional form; but the contents run amok, at once mocking the form and drawing their own imaginative life from it. (pp. 71-3)

Barthelme will not bore us. He dismisses old and irrelevant forms which no longer conform to the reality we experience. Part of his technique is contrariness: if the predictable form is fast-moving excitement, as in a Batman story, he excites us with absurd delays and digressions. He approves of the litany as "the only form of discourse" because it can be so ludicrously violated by substitutions in content. And he admires "a long sentence moving at a certain pace down the page aiming for the bottom" precisely because it is "still a construction of man, a structure to be treasured for its weakness, as opposed to the strength of stones." (p. 75)

Barthelme's vignettes are … not conventional arguments in the dialectics of form, but imaginative volcanoes, radical stopgap measures to save experiences which might otherwise be eroded with our loss of traditional standards. In this sense he is a counterrevolutionary, opposing the new language of technology and manipulation with pleas for old-fashioned interest and imagination. In a new world, old values must be expressed in new form. For irrational, inconsecutive times, Barthelme's forms revive the values of imagination; the rescue is performed with the finest attentions to art. Not just a juggler of fragments, Barthelme is an assembler and constructor of objects … Barthelme has said that "The point of collage is that unlike things are stuck together to make, in the best case, a new reality. This new reality, in the best case, may be or imply a comment on the other reality from which it came, and may also be much else. It's an itself, if it's successful." The resulting art can be figurative without yielding to a one-to-one reference. (p. 76)

Because fiction conventionally tends to the opposite extreme, Barthelme often compensates with his close attention to writing as object. "I enjoy editing and enjoy doing layout—problems of design," he has remarked. "I could very cheerfully be a typographer," and his story "Our Work and Why We Do It" details the joys of a shop of printers. Because of this infatuation Barthelme has berated himself, and been berated by critics, for not writing more novels; feeling that he is unable to sustain works, his critics cite him as a craftsman of fragments. But although his books are arranged as collections of short stories, they have with increasing strength boasted the consistency of novels. (pp. 77-8)

The key to Barthelme's new aesthetic for fiction is that the work may stand for itself, that it need not yield to complete explication of something else in the world but may exist as an individual object, something beautiful and surprising and deep. His innovation is peculiarly American…. Barthelme dares, like Vonnegut, to say the unspeakable, the vile and imaginative things which lie beneath the surface of our mundane, anesthetizing forms. More abstract writers such as William S. Burroughs make "cut-ups" of these forms, taking words and rearranging them so that new images form from the old constituents. But Barthelme is more the contextualist, closer to our actual society and its dreck; "To steal is to proclaim the value of what is stolen," he has written, and what he steals from contemporary America—its junk, its blanketing—is recycled and given immense value in his artistic act. Burroughs works with words alone; Barthelme takes the forms in which we kill them and brings them back to life…. (p. 80)