Sixty Stories

Summary

Sixty Stories is Donald Barthelme's own selection of his short fiction from roughly two decades, drawn from collections such as Come Back, Dr. Caligari, Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts, City Life, Sadness, Amateurs and Great Days, together with some previously uncollected pieces. The stories are short, often only a few pages, and are among the defining works of American postmodern fiction. Barthelme works by collage and fragment: he mixes the vocabulary of advertising, bureaucracy, philosophy, art criticism and pop culture; he builds stories from lists, questionnaires, dialogues without attribution, and illustrations; and he places absurd premises inside matter-of-fact narration. Beneath the play there is frequently grief, loneliness and moral seriousness. In 'The Balloon' an enormous balloon appears over Manhattan and the city's inhabitants respond to it in every possible way, until the narrator reveals a private reason for its appearance connected with a separation from his lover. 'Me and Miss Mandible' is the diary of a thirty-five-year-old man who, through a bureaucratic error, has been placed in a sixth-grade class, where he falls for his teacher. 'The Indian Uprising' describes a city under attack by Comanches, with barricades built from domestic furniture, as a fractured love story and an oblique response to the Vietnam era. 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning' assembles fragmentary glimpses of the public man. 'Views of My Father Weeping' follows a narrator investigating the death of his father, run over by an aristocrat's carriage, while repeatedly glimpsing the father crying. 'Game' is told by one of two officers locked in an underground missile bunker who must turn their keys together and are slowly losing their minds. 'Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby' is a deadpan account of friends planning the hanging of a man who has gone too far. 'The School' recounts, in a teacher's casual voice, a year in which everything in a classroom dies, from plants and pets to parents, and the children ask what death means. 'The Glass Mountain' is a numbered-sentence parody of a fairy-tale quest. 'The Death of Edward Lear' imagines the poet staging his own death as a performance. 'Florence Green is 81' concerns an elderly wealthy woman and the people who orbit her. The collection is comic and sad at once, and its fragments together form a portrait of anxious, overinformed modern life.

Plot or Argument

• Early stories (1960s)

  Pieces such as 'Me and Miss Mandible', 'The Balloon', 'The Indian Uprising' and 'Robert Kennedy Saved from Drowning' establish Barthelme's collage method and deadpan absurdism.

• Family and grief

  'Views of My Father Weeping' and related stories treat fathers, inheritance and loss through dreamlike investigation.

• Cold War and institutions

  'Game' and 'Report' satirize military logic and technocratic language, with madness lurking under protocol.

• Fables and parodies

  'The Glass Mountain', 'Cortés and Montezuma' and 'The Death of Edward Lear' rework fairy tale, history and biography.

• Later dialogue stories

  In the 1970s Barthelme developed stories made almost entirely of unattributed dialogue between two voices, as in pieces from Great Days.

Lessons

• Fragments can carry feeling

  Barthelme's broken forms are not merely clever; they mirror how modern consciousness receives the world in pieces. The stories show that collage can be a vehicle for grief and tenderness.

  • Where in 'The Balloon' does the story shift from play to private feeling?
  • Does the fragmentation of 'The Indian Uprising' make it harder or easier to feel its violence?

• Language as a material

  Barthelme treats jargon, clichés and media phrases as found objects. Reading him trains attention to how institutional language shapes and evades meaning.

  • Which kinds of jargon does Barthelme parody most often?
  • How does 'Game' use procedural language to convey breakdown?
  • Is his satire affectionate or bleak?

• Explaining death to children

  'The School' turns a sequence of deaths into black comedy and ends with the children's real questions about meaning. It shows how absurdity can open a space for serious inquiry.

  • Why is the teacher's voice so casual?
  • What do the children ask for at the end, and why?

Context

Barthelme wrote during the Cold War, the Vietnam War and the rise of television and mass advertising, and his stories absorb the media noise of that era. He is grouped with postmodern writers such as Robert Coover, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, and his visual collages owe much to Dada and Pop Art.

Composition

Selected by Barthelme and published by G. P. Putnam's Sons in 1981. A companion volume, Forty Stories, followed in 1987.

Reception

Sixty Stories confirmed Barthelme's standing as one of the most influential American short-story writers of his time. He shaped later writers including George Saunders, Lydia Davis and Dave Eggers, and is widely taught in creative writing programmes.

Comparisons

• the-new-york-trilogy

  Both are New York postmodernisms that turn genre conventions into metaphysical puzzles about identity and language.

• the-portable-dorothy-parker

  Two great New Yorker ironists, separated by forty years: Parker's barbed realism and Barthelme's surreal deadpan both hide melancholy under wit.

• gullivers-travels

  Barthelme's absurd premises, like Swift's, satirize institutions by literalizing their logic.

• maupassant-selected-short-stories

  Maupassant's tightly plotted tales offer the classical model of the short story that Barthelme's fragments deliberately dismantle.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• The ending of The Balloon, where after pages of the city's theories about the vast balloon stretched over Manhattan, the narrator reveals that he put it up himself during his lover's absence in Norway and takes it down when she returns. Ask what the public spectacle was really about.
• The flat, chatty voice of the teacher in The School as the trees, the snakes, the gerbil, the puppy, and then people connected to the class die one after another, and the turn at the end when the children ask him whether death is what gives meaning to life.
• Game, in which two officers locked in an underground missile bunker must turn their keys together, each carrying a pistol to watch the other. Notice how the narrator begins writing descriptions of natural objects on the bunker walls.
• The numbered sentences of The Glass Mountain, in which a narrator climbs a glass mountain at a Manhattan street corner with the help of plumber's friends, while his acquaintances jeer from below. Watch what he does when he reaches the enchanted symbol at the top.
• Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, where a group of friends plan the hanging of a man who has gone too far with the same care they might give a party, debating invitations, music, and drinks.

Key terms and names

Collage

Barthelme's central method: building a story from pieces of found language, lists, questionnaires, dialogue, and sometimes pictures, the way a visual artist glues fragments together. The Indian Uprising and Views of My Father Weeping are built this way.

Deadpan

A manner of telling absurd or terrible events in a calm, ordinary voice. The teacher in The School and the friends in the Colby story speak this way, and the gap between voice and event produces both comedy and dread.

Postmodernism

The name given to fiction of the 1960s and after that calls attention to its own artifice and mixes high and low language. Barthelme is one of its chief American practitioners, alongside writers such as Robert Coover and William Gass.

The New Yorker

The weekly magazine where most of these stories first appeared. Its sophisticated urban readership is part of the joke in many stories, which are set in a Manhattan of galleries, analysts, and parties.

Me and Miss Mandible

An early story told as the diary of a thirty-five-year-old former insurance adjuster placed by bureaucratic error in a sixth-grade class, where the system refuses to admit its mistake.

Views of My Father Weeping

A story in which a son investigates his father's death under an aristocrat's carriage, while the narrative is repeatedly interrupted by scenes of his father crying. The investigation never quite reaches a conclusion.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension In The Balloon, how do the people of the city respond to the balloon, and what explanation does the narrator finally give for it?
2. Comprehension What dies, in order, during the year described in The School, and what do the children ask their teacher at the end?
3. Comprehension What are the rules that bind the two officers in Game, and how does each man's behavior change as the relief crew fails to arrive?
4. Interpretation The teacher in The School speaks of the deaths as though they were bad luck with classroom supplies. Does his casual voice make the story less serious or more? Point to where the tone changes.
5. Interpretation In Game, the narrator writes descriptions of natural objects on the walls of a bunker built to launch a war. What is he trying to hold onto, and why does Barthelme give him that particular habit?
6. Interpretation The friends in the Colby story never question whether hanging him is right; they argue only about arrangements. What is Barthelme showing about how polite procedure can stand in for moral judgment?
7. Big Question Can comedy and fragmentation tell the truth about grief and death as well as a straightforward story can, or does something get lost?
8. Big Question When people live surrounded by advertising, jargon, and news, do they lose the ability to say what they mean, and how could it be recovered?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 90 (Scripture)

  Moses' psalm sets the brevity of human life against the eternity of God and prays to be taught to number our days. The children in The School are asking for exactly this kind of wisdom after a year of deaths, and the story leaves them with a teacher who cannot give it.

• Genesis 11:1-9 (Scripture)

  At Babel a people united by one language build a tower to make a name for themselves, and their speech is confounded. Barthelme's stories are full of language that no longer joins people, from the jargon of Me and Miss Mandible to the protocols of Game, and Babel offers an old account of how that happens.

• Augustine, Confessions, Book IV (Church Fathers)

  Augustine recalls the death of a close friend in his youth and how grief made his whole city hateful to him, then reflects on loving mortal things as if they could not die. Views of My Father Weeping and The School circle the same grief but stop short of any place for it to rest.

• Pascal, Pensees, on diversion (fragment 139 in Brunschvicg's numbering) (Great Conversation)

  Pascal argues that human unhappiness comes from being unable to sit quietly in a room, so people flee into diversion to avoid thinking about their condition. Game literally locks two men in a room, and much of the collection reads as a portrait of diversion: noise, novelty, and chatter covering a fear that keeps breaking through.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Modern people receive the world in fragments of media, jargon, and institutional procedure; a smooth, traditional story would misrepresent that experience; yet grief, love, and fear persist beneath the fragments. Therefore, the collection implies, the truest way to show modern feeling is to assemble the fragments themselves and let the buried emotion surface where the noise breaks, as it does at the end of The Balloon or in the children's question in The School.

Rhetorical device: bathos. In Some of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby, the grave matter of putting a friend to death is lowered at every turn into the trivial concerns of a social occasion, such as whom to invite and what music to play, so that the reader feels the moral weight the characters ignore.

Debate: Resolved: Barthelme's comedy deepens rather than undercuts the grief in his stories.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Barthelme is famous for play, parody, and collage, yet many of his stories end in loss. Using The Balloon, The School, and Views of My Father Weeping, argue whether the playful surface of these stories is a way of avoiding grief or a way of approaching it.

Comparison with Gulliver's Travels: Swift and Barthelme both take an absurd premise and narrate it with a straight face to expose the folly of institutions. Compare Gulliver's account of the Academy of Lagado with Barthelme's Game or Me and Miss Mandible, and argue which writer's satire offers a clearer standard by which the folly is judged.

Medical Lens

Medicine is not a major subject, but several stories touch on psychiatric and existential themes. 'Game' portrays two missile-silo officers whose isolation and protocol produce paranoia and breakdown, a satire of Cold War nuclear doctrine. 'The School' and 'Views of My Father Weeping' are oblique studies of death, bereavement and how children and adults talk about loss. 'Florence Green is 81' touches on old age and the people who surround the wealthy elderly. A story titled 'Brain Damage' may also be included in the selection. Treat any clinical reading as metaphorical: Barthelme's madness is mostly a satire of institutional reason.

• 'Game'

  Two officers confined in a missile bunker, each watching the other, deteriorate psychologically under rigid protocol.

  Madness PsychosisNeurosis Anxiety
• 'The School'

  A teacher recounts the cascade of deaths affecting his class and the children's questions about death.

  Death DyingGrief
• 'Views of My Father Weeping'

  A son investigates his father's death in a carriage accident while visions of the weeping father intrude.

  Grief
• 'Florence Green is 81'

  Portrait of an elderly rich woman and the hangers-on gathered around her.

  Aging Senescence

Creative Prompts

• Fiction

  Write a Barthelme-style story built entirely from a hospital discharge form, an insurance letter and a voicemail transcript.

• Classroom

  Read 'The School' aloud and discuss how its humour helps or hinders talking about death with young people.

• Essay

  Argue that 'Game' is as relevant to automated weapons today as it was to the nuclear balance of the 1960s.

• Adaptation

  Storyboard 'The Balloon' as a three-minute animated short.

Further Reading

• Forty Stories, Donald Barthelme

• Snow White, Donald Barthelme

• Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme, Tracy Daugherty