ABSTRACT
Donald Barthelme’s is an art of absences. It is absence that dominates his novel The Dead Father, where nineteen men drag the great Dead Father – who is not entirely dead, since he speaks – to some ultimate tomb. Anxiety and depression result from the critical gaze of this part of the ego which sets itself up as a kind of censorious superego, an awesome and stern father. The story is one of the most successful explorations of the epistemological uncertainty that affects Barthelme’s world. The post-modernist text resolves nothing, and denies self-sufficiency and autonomy. It presents antithetical meanings or postures, presents and explores the range of the antithesis, of the distance itself, and leaves the reader, as Roland Barthes puts it, ‘suspended’. Freudian psychology tells us that access to the symbolic is gained through what it calls ‘primal repression’.
