Barthelme's Snow White: A Study in Parody and Intertextuality

Abstract

Barthelme's Snow White is a postmodern parodic intertextual novel. In this novel Barthelme emphasizes snow white's dissatisfaction through the use of fragmentary composition, self-reflection, metafiction, intertextuality, irony, parody and imagery evoking incompleteness. He also demonstrates the bankruptcy of language and literary traditions by parodying well known style and methods which is an innovative technique of postmodernism to foreground the subversive and intertextual mode of postmodern novel. He manipulates myth of a fairy tale for his own comic or parodic purposes. Hisparody of the genre of a fairy tale, of its mythical status and meaning, does not mean the rejection of fairy tales. In his depiction, Snow White has lost her mythical innocence as a representation of goodness, traditional values and morality as well as literary tradition a fairy tale represents. By becoming vulgar, erotic, anti-psychological, pseudo-intellectual and construction of clichés associated with contemporary consumer sensibility i.e. eroticism instead of traditional platonic and mythical innocence, indecency instead of politeness, calculativeness instead of honesty,Snow Whitehas become a parodic version of her pretextual ancestor. In the novel, self-reflexivity is developed by narrator's frequent allusions, reference to and meditations on various works of art, scientific works and subjects. Metafictional strategies are used to reveal the fictional nature of the work itself. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such texts also explores the possible fictionality of the world outside the literary fictional texts.