Barthelme

…

…to interacting with new and strange fictions, threatening fictions, "future" fictions. Placing "Me and Miss Mandible" in a literary-cultural context demands we identify where we are, right now, as readers, and what we can do to dispel anxiety and confusion in our interpretive communities. As to the state of the narrator, he remains lost, comfortably irretrievable. Whereas we may be temporarily stabilized, he somehow stays outside the discussion, drifting. I suggest we leave him there.