Human Experience Tradition and Experimentation
... , his father, and his interests in contemporary art, his youth/young adult experience, and the various writers and critics that often wrote about his stories are three main influences that built Barthelme’s writing talent and style, which is clearly represented in the two short stories “A Shower of Gold” and “The Phantom of the Opera’s Friend”, which show Barthelme’s main themes of failure, parody, and collage. ... Barthelme started with his writing experience at an early age, having many influences that eventually shaped him into the writer he became. ... Clearly it is evident that Barthelme had a solid foundation with experience to begin his serious writing career. ... Barthelme came to admire many of the writers at the New Yorker simply because of their experience and knowledge. ... ” ("1969-1980: Experiment and Tradition," in The American Short Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History. ... People remember him for his inventiveness and experimentation with language and speech. ... Despite all the attacks of critics and society, Barthelme kept on writing because he was more interested in the human experience of that society rather than making value judgments about it (“Donald Barthelme,” in Dictionary of Literary Biography Yearbook. ... Opinions were not as important to him as the importance of learning and gaining experience. ... He constantly tested the confines of fiction and often broke those boundaries, which is why Richard Gilman commented in The Confusion of Realms that Barthelme was: One of a handful of American writers who are working to replenish and extend the art of fiction instead of trying to add to the stock of entertainment’s, visions, and human documents that fiction keeps piling up (Moyer.