Barthelme

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 …showed first 75 words of 1910 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1910 total…to interacting with new and strange fictions, threatening fictions, "future" fictions. Placing "Me and Miss Mandible" in a literary-cultural context demands we identify where we are, right now, as readers, and what we can do to dispel anxiety and confusion in our interpretive communities. As to the state of the narrator, he remains lost, comfortably irretrievable. Whereas we may be temporarily stabilized, he somehow stays outside the discussion, drifting. I suggest we leave him there.