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Donald Barthelme is considered by many to be the pioneer of American postmodernism. An associated and widespread critical notion about Barthelme's discourse is that lacking a central meaning or stable subject, Barthelme's characteristic tale forms itself out of the fragments and junk of our contemporary civilization¡ª¡°whose random components are pasted together in a manner akin to dadaist collage.¡± (Molesworth 1) Few authors exemplify this type of writing better than Donald Barthelme: stress technique over substance, structure over content, signifiers over signifieds, language "itself" over the materials - texts, ideas, realities - it represents and transforms. Lois Gordon claimed in her Twayne volume, Donald Barthelme that ¡°[He] rejects traditional chronology, plot, character, time, space, grammar, syntax, metaphor, and simile, as well as the traditional distinctions between fact and fiction. What used to organize reality -- time, space, and the structure of language -- is now often disjointed, and language, and the difficulties in using it, becomes the very subject of his art. Most obvious is . . . its refusal to be an orderly reflection of, and comment upon, a stable, external world.¡± Among his many famous shor