Barthelme's Twisted Fathering

On Donald Barthelme, The Dead Father

Abstract

This paper approaches Donald Barthelme's The Dead Father along the dual, paradoxical, and seemingly mutually exclusive terms of quest and anti-quest, murder and rescue, life and death. Its objective is to show how these antonyms exist inseparably and interwoven in the novel, successfully resisting logically coherent binary orders. The master trope of the analysis is chiasmus, the trope of deception, which seems to open a fruitful and "untrodden" path for reading the novel. The first half of the essay examines the chiasmus taking place on the thematic level of the novel, in the power relations between Thomas and the Dead Father and the possible twists of this twisted trope. The second half examines this chiastic inversion of power relations as an ironic inversion, as a reversed Oedipal situation and tries to read the interplay of psychoanalytic theory and Barthelme's novel in terms of irony, ironical inversion, and parody.