[What some] critics fail to notice is that Barthelme does not confine himself to the recording of public insanities. He has, in fact, been more concerned with private tragedy, specifically the tragedy which results from "emotional defeats," and in Barthelme's fiction that means only one thing: the failure of a man to achieve a satisfactory and lasting relationship with a woman. In his four collections of short stories, Come Back, Dr. Caligari; Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts; City Life; Sadness, and in the novel Snow White, he charts over and over again the agony caused by this failure. Though often concealed by a cover of complicated language, as in "The Indian Uprising,"… and though not always the main subject, this kind of defeat is touched on in most of Barthelme's collected "fragments."

Barthelme is first and foremost an intellectual writer, a cool observer, who transforms and distances emotional suffering through wit and irony and, above all, through verbal play. He continually surprises with revitalized clichés and invented words. He recognizes the appropriate moment for literary allusions, for juxtaposing the concrete with the abstract, and … for infusing life into inanimate objects. He uses with great originality Joycean tricks: questions and answers, lists, double and triple entendres, plays on words. And he has a special gift for fantasy, sometimes whimsical, sometimes grotesque. It is, then, by means of verbal brilliance that Barthelme turns the agony of his characters into something ridiculous or comic, and forces the reader to respond to the suffering with laughter and esthetic joy. (Barthelme is worth reading for his humor alone). But the richness and complexity of his fiction does not derive solely from his verbal talent. In most of his stories he is writing about a number of things at once, often unrelated, and it is the mesh-ing of these disparate subjects into an artistic whole, reinforced by a vision layered in ambiguity and a voice always compelling, which makes Barthelme an original and important writer.

With a careful reading of the four volumes of short stories and Snow White, it becomes clear that Barthelme's main subjects have been love and language or women and words. For the most part the tragedy in his fictional universe results from the fact that men cannot live without women or without words and that with few exceptions they are constantly betrayed by both. This, then, has been the "message," the steady muffled sound throbbing at the center of Barthelme's work.

In order to understand the brilliant eight-page short story, "The Indian Uprising," one must be aware of what Barthelme heroes say about women and about words. Men, they tell us, because of their biological need, are in women's power, and this sexual hunger is never-ending…. This desperate and insatiable sexual need stimulates fantasies of real and imagined young girls. And these nymphs are always around, crossing streets, getting into buses, moving through rooms, taking off blouses in train compartments, hanging their hair out of windows. They are always there, tormenting men with some part of their anatomy. Even eleven-year-olds skip in and out of Barthelme's stories with their seductive knees. But except for the unthinking brute, no man can ever have a satisfactory relationship with a woman; her nature prevents it. Women are hard, mean, inscrutable, and bundles of contradictions. They are incurable romantics, always waiting for the perfect lover. Either they hold back sexually, or they are fickle and unfaithful. (Only two or three of Barthelme's heroines escape these unhappy traits.)

But undoubtedly the greatest problem for the Barthelme hero is the scorn he faces as sexual partner. The fear of female disdain, and the devastating effects of this humiliation, are dealt with again and again in Barthelme's fiction. Many of his male characters lack "boldness," and it is this lack which sends females flying to seek "gorilla lovers." (pp. 134-35)

As for words, Barthelme characters say obvious things about them, but in an original way. They find words inadequate for expressing thoughts and feelings, especially emotional suffering. Barthelme's artists long to make statements, to say something significant and definitive, but when they try, something other than they intended comes out. The word has been used "incorrectly," "misprounced," "misspelled," and "It was the wrong word." Most words are so overused they no longer have any meaning, and, in addition, many have become "dreck," "sludge," "stuffing." One heroine says things "just to fill the air." A narrator strings words together, for the most part unconnected, and then tells the reader, "you can do it too it's as easy as it looks." It is with words that the "steamy" and "sordid" deeds of men are recorded. The esthetician in Snow White, standing in the shower, can be destroyed, but there is always a possibility someone will remember his corrupting words and repeat them. Paul, in the same novel, would "retract the whole written word." The impossibility of retracting what has been written and spoken makes for tragedy because words can betray. And that they can destroy as effectively as real weapons is admirably illustrated in "Game." In "Sentence," however, the narrator does admit that words are all men have to work with, the only means for recording their fantasies, of preserving their "souvenirs," which might "someday merge, blur—cohere is the word, maybe into something meaningful."

In approaching "The Indian Uprising," one must not only be aware of Barthelme's preoccupation with love and language but also his practice of often describing relationships between men and woman in terms of war. (pp. 135-36)

"The Indian Uprising" is neither a dream nor the description of an hallucinatory journey. Nor is it "the disintegration of fiction into its raw materials." It is an intricately constructed short story (because of its compactness, its intensity, perhaps better described as a prose poem) in which each word, each sentence fits together to render rich psychic reality. It does radiate "anxieties" but these are explainable. And it does on initial reading generate unease because of its ambiguity. The seeming disconnectedness, the rapid shift in locale, the sudden appearance of unexplained characters confuse the reader. (p. 136)

Although "The Indian Uprising" is from beginning to end an extended metaphor of war, it is not for the most part about an outward apocalyptic landscape. It concerns the hidden territory of the narrator's own private world, a world filled with bewilderment and anxiety and suffering at his failure to connect, to experience a lasting love relationship, more specifically the failure to find satisfactory sexual fulfillment because of what he is meant to feel as his own sexual inadequacy. But Barthelme's hero, unlike Ford's in The Good Soldier, is aware of what is going on, even if he does not always understand why. "The Indian Uprising" exposes, then, the devastating effect of the break-up of a relationship between the narrator and the girl he presently loves, Sylvia. Barthelme is doing what many writers have done before in describing the disintegration of an individual in terms of the collapse of society around him. What makes this twentieth-century version of war between a man and woman original is the brilliant manipulating of words and the artistic atomizing of chronology, as well as the perfect marriage between public and private tragedy.

In "The Indian Uprising" Barthelme weaves a mobile tapestry on which three-dimensional figures change constantly, appear and reappear like characters in a speeded-up film, and where like a refrain every so often the hero's private heart is exposed. The frenzied, but calculated manner in which Barthelme uses words creates an exciting tension, giving the illusion that the words themselves are alive. And the words, as Indians, are. At the end, the narrator is finally cornered, beaten down, and defeated by the "savage, black eyes, paint, feathers, beads." But from the very beginning of the story the reader is captured, drawn into the swirling battle, assaulted by words into which Barthelme has breathed a pulsating and savage life. Barthelme is, then, telling his hero's sad story, reinforcing it from time to time by alluding to some of the horrors of contemporary history.

There are two key sentences in "The Indian Uprising," one near the end, "The sickness of the quarrel lay thick in the bed," and the other, not quite half way through the story, "There was a sort of muck running in the gutters, a yellowish, filthy stream suggesting excrement, or nervousness, a city that does not know what it has done to deserve baldness, errors, infidelity." By changing the opening sentence, "We defended the city as best we could," to "I defended myself as best I could," one understands that the narrator himself is the city under siege and that the Indians are the words with which Sylvia is attacking him. (pp. 136-37)

The story, the charting of the narrator's emotional history with Sylvia, has a see-saw motion. After each upward swing the hero descends a little lower until finally he touches bottom, defeated, no longer able to summon either memory or fantasy to sustain him. (p. 137)

[By the end of "The Indian Uprising" the] emasculation of the hero, like a prisoner without belt or shoelaces, is complete; but the indians, Sylvia's words, will continue, in his mind at least, to fall on his head like heavy rain shattering all interior silence. Even more tragic is the death of hope, hope for some kind of ordinary life with Sylvia. The vision of identical houses in subdivisions, the kind of thing Barthelme ordinarily satirizes as the vulgar and hideous result of our civilization, here appears like a dream of paradise, a place where there might be some possibility of connection, some chance of a normal existence. So ends this modern tale of love, this tale of sexual slaughter.

Paul in Snow White, expounding on the purpose of the artist, says, "I don't care what, I insist only that it be relevant, in a strange way, to the scene that has chosen to spread itself out before us, the theatre of our lives." Barthelme follows Paul's advice. But he does not take seriously all of what another of his characters, Baskerville, says "grandly" about the aim of literature, "the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks the heart." For Barthelme is not concerned with the reader's heart; rather, his destiny is to crack the mind and set it free to spin in his created wonder. (p. 145)

Maclin Bocock, "'The Indian Uprising' or Donald Barthelme's Strange Object Covered with Fur," in fiction international (copyright © 1975 by Joe David Bellamy), No. 4/5, 1975, pp. 134-45.