Getting Into Sixty Stories By Donald Barthelme
Donald Barthelme's Sixty Stories is a collection that sits on the shelf between "I should read this" and "I opened it once and gave up." It's not difficult because it's obscure. It's difficult because Barthelme doesn't give you the safety net of narrative progression or emotional payoff. Each story is its own self-contained system, and the job of reading it is figuring out what system you're looking at. The collection came out in 1981, when Barthelme was already well-established as a major figure in American postmodern fiction. He'd published several books before this, and this one is essentially a career survey. You get stories from his first book, Come Back, Dr. Caligari, all the way through to later work. The range is significant. Some pieces are four paragraphs long. Others run two or three pages. None of them follow a conventional arc.
How Sixty Stories By Donald Barthelme Actually Works
Most people approach these stories expecting them to mean something you can paraphrase. That's the wrong move. Barthelme isn't hiding a moral or a thesis under the absurdity. The absurdity is the point, and it's operating on the same frequency as the surface content. A story about a man whose job is to evaluate how realistic other people's dreams are isn't a metaphor for bureaucratic alienation. It's a story about dream evaluation, and the bureaucratic logic inside it is exactly as rigorous as the bureaucratic logic outside it. I spent a lot of time trying to catalogue which stories were "about" what when I was teaching a workshop on postmodern short fiction. It didn't work. The exercise was productive in a different way than I expected. Students learned to stop asking what the story meant and start asking what the story does. That distinction matters. "The Balloon" isn't a meditation on urban isolation even though you could argue it's that. It's a piece of writing that constructs an entire scenario around an impossible premise and then treats the premise with complete sincerity. The effect comes from that tonal consistency, not from any subtext. Here's a practical problem I ran into when preparing course materials around this collection: students would pick a single story and treat it as representative of Barthelme's entire project. That's inaccurate. The later stories, especially the ones added in this volume, show a shift in method. The early work relies more on parodic structure — taking a recognizable genre or form and hollowing it out. The later work is more willing to just start in media res with a premise that has no source text. "The Sailboat" has no genre to parody. It just presents a situation and follows it to its logical conclusion, which happens to be nowhere particular.
If you're reading this for a class, the workaround I found was to assign stories in clusters by technique rather than chronologically. Group the parodic stories together. Group the premise-driven ones together. The contrast between the two modes becomes obvious within a few pages, and it helps students stop expecting every story to do the same thing.
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What You'll Actually Encounter
There's a story called "The Indian Hunter" that appears in several anthologies and is sometimes treated as the entry point to Barthelme's work. It's not. It's a short piece about a man who shoots an arrow into the air and then spends the rest of the story tracking it. The joke is that the tracking takes longer than the shooting, and the narrative structure mirrors that imbalance. It's funny. It's also an accurate description of how Barthelme's prose generally operates — the setup is quick, the unpacking is where the work happens. "Come Back, Dr. Caligari" is the title story from his first collection. It's approximately eight hundred words. It reconstructs the plot of the 1920 German expressionist film Caligari using only dialogue tags and the word "said" in increasingly absurd contexts. The story demonstrates Barthelme's method at its most distilled: take a cultural object, remove everything that makes it familiar, and see what's left. What's left is a skeleton of a narrative that still carries emotional weight despite having no traditional content. One of the most useful things about this collection is that it includes stories Barthelme wrote for different purposes. Some were originally published in New York magazine. Some appeared in literary journals. A few were written as exercises or for teaching purposes. Knowing that context changes how you read them. The magazine pieces tend to be more accessible because they were written for an audience that wasn't looking for literary difficulty. The journal pieces are where Barthelme gets more experimental, more willing to abandon any remaining tether to conventional readability.
Common Pitfalls
Reading Barthelme linearly is a mistake. The stories aren't arranged in order of difficulty, and they don't build toward anything. Pick a story that catches your attention and read it straight through without stopping to analyze. If you finish it and have no idea what happened, that's fine. Read it again. Most of the stories reveal something on the second pass that wasn't visible on the first. The ones that don't are usually the ones where the effect depends on a single formal gesture, and you've already gotten it. Another issue: people tend to read Barthelme as purely ironic. He's not. The stories are funny, often very funny, but the humor isn't cynical. Barthelme seems genuinely interested in the possibilities of language and narrative structure, and that interest comes through even when the content is absurdist. Treating the stories as jokes misses the craft. The craft is real. The laughter is a side effect. If you want to track down the collection, Sixty Stories By Donald Barthelme is widely available in paperback and ebook formats. Random House published the original hardcover edition. There have been multiple printings and a Dover Thrift edition that's affordable if you're on a budget. The text is stable across editions — Barthelme wasn't the type to revise heavily after publication, so you're getting essentially the same collection wherever you find it.
The stories resist summarization more than most postmodern work because the resistance is built into the form. You can describe what happens in a Barthelme story. You can't describe what the story does without actually reading it. That's true of most good writing, but it's especially true here because Barthelme constructs each piece as a self-contained mechanism. Take it apart and it stops working. The only way to understand it is to let it run.
