The Narrator in Barthelme's Me and Miss Mandible

Me and Miss Mandible - The Narrator

Are we frightened of the "fantastic" literary text? Is there something inherently threatening about a work like Barthelme's "Me and Miss Mandible," something obtrusive which, as we read, forces us away from the text? A pronounced feeling of uneasiness seems to mark our reception of Barthelme, a range of anxiety expressed mainly in our responses to the story's narrator. Questions concerning his reliability and authenticity, and why Barthelme chooses to construct him in the manner he does become paramount, serving as pivotal gauges from which we read and critique his character. However, in establishing such gauges we retard our entrance into the "fantastic," reducing the elements of Barthelme's fiction to mere "realist" side effect: by-products of a normative writing model. How "Me and Miss Mandible" differs, in its narrative structure and character development, from works by O'Connor, Chopin, and Gordimer is perhaps the more pertinent issue when we discuss our responses to the story and its narrator. Reading Barthelme requires new strategies and fresh gauges; a New Critical approach, like the one used with O'Connor's Julian, can only lead to more anxiety and a dwarfed understanding of the text's indeterminant nature and its capactiy to destabilize and resituate not only the reader's, but its own functioning cultural context.

Before examining Barthelme's destabilizing/stabilizing dynamic, we must first acquaint ourselves with those stylistic features and textual devices he uses which set him apart from "realist" or "naturalist" writers. Barthelme, as noted by Lance Olson in his article "Slumgullions, or Some Notes toward Trying to Introduce Donald Bart...

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... and what we can do to dispel anxiety and confusion in our interpretive communities. As to the state of the narrator in our ongoing critical discussion, he remains lost, comfortably irretreivable. Whereas we may be temporarily stabilized, he somehow stays outside the discussion, drifting. I suggest we leave him there.

Works Cited

Barthelme, Donald, Sixty Stories. New York: Penguin, 1993

Calinescu, Matei, "Modernism and Ideology." Modernism: Challenges and Perspectives. Ed. Monique Chefdor, Chicago: U of Illinois Press,1986

Eagleton, Terry, Literary Theory. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983

Graff, Gerald, "Disliking Books at an Early Age." Falling Into Theory. Ed. David H. Richter, Boston: Bedford, 1994. 36-43

Olson, Lance, "Slumgullions, Or Some Notes toward Trying to Introduce Donald Barthelme." Critical Inquiry, 1989, v14