A Study Guide for Donald Barthelme's "The King of Jazz"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Donald Barthelme's "The King of Jazz", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Short Stories for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Short Stories for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Mar 22, 2018
• ISBN: 9781410388667

Book preview

17

King of Jazz

Donald Barthelme

1977

Introduction

In his essay A Symposium on Fiction in Shenandoah, author Donald Barthelme explains how he thinks about his creative, postmodern style of writing. He not only speaks for himself but also speculates on what motivates his entire generation: Painters had to go out and reinvent painting because of the invention of photography, and I think films have done something of the sort for us (quoted in the Barthelme entry in The Scribner Encyclopedia of American Lives). Barthelme refers to the innovations of artists such as the nineteenth-century impressionists, who pushed themselves to find new styles of painting that would reveal something about their subjects that a camera could not. Because photographs present the bare facts of what the eye can see, painters instead tried to give an impression of the scene—hence the name impressionists—by forgoing meticulous realistic detail in favor of capturing the effects of colors and light. Barthelme and other postmodernist writers, in part, do the same things with words that the impressionists did with paint. Instead of using words to capture the bare facts of realistic details, postmodern prose often concentrates on creating images and mood.

The short story King of Jazz, which first appeared in the New Yorker issue of February 7, 1977 (as The King of Jazz), and was included in Barthelme's 1979 collection Great Days, is a good example of postmodern style. The story noticeably lacks descriptions of the setting or characters and has very few dialogue attributions. As such, the story relies on the dialogue itself, leaving it up to the reader to determine who is speaking and to imagine each speaker's tone of voice and any accompanying actions. The story can also be found in Barthelme's Sixty Stories (1981).

Author Biography

Barthelme was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on April 7, 1931. Named after his father, he was the oldest of five children in a