Donald Barthelme's fiction : fragmentation, the "trash phenomenon," and ironic vision

Donald. Barthelme's fictional works utilize a fragmentary form and ironic mode to portray modern experience as non-linear, disparate, fluid, and dominated by the created "trash objects" of technology, the media, and the arts. The fragmentary form differs radically from the traditional fiction of complex characterization, symbolism, the novel, and the epiphany. Furthermore, this form initiates a new structuring principle of collage and image association which is conducive in treating the present inadequacy of language and literature to express contemporary consciousness. The ironic vision affords the artist a temporary liberation from the conditioning influences around him, or what Barthelme has labeled the "trash phenomenon"—the accumulation of dead historical and literary relics and the cliches and recycled fantasies of modern existence.