the first story that, as he later put it, “rang his cherries” was Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon.” Barthelme didn’t tell straightforward stories. He sought to fracture the surface of fiction to show the underpinnings on which its illusions depended. As with other postmodernists, the point was not to make the reader forget the conventions of the charade but to see them more clearly. A truly fulfilled reader was one who always remembered he was just reading a story.
