ABSTRACT
The modern novel can indeed be considered as a laboratory of discourse; what basically distinguishes it from older romance is the fact that the telling is as important as, and often transcends, the story told – as it does in Joyce’s Ulysses. So the casual – as well as the serious – reader of Donald Barthelme spontaneously senses that he is not considered a qualified or trustworthy interlocutor of either the multifaceted narrators of these works or the secretive author who creates them. Many critics have taken Barthelme to task for his incapacity to write long fictions. It is true that both his novels – Snow White and The Dead Father – look very much like collections of short fictions, except for the fact that the same characters turn up in the various sequences. Barthelme’s approach to the problem of literary discourse is neither that of the Marxists nor that of Borges.
