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[Expositions 9.1 (2015) 19–30]  Expositions (online) ISSN: 1747–5376 
 

Clearing Being:  

Donald Barthelme’s Snow White and the Thought of Martin Heidegger 
 

CHARLES CULLUM 

Worcester State University 

 

 

Donald Barthelme, one of the foremost writers of postmodern fiction in the mid-to-later twentieth 

century, was continually engaged in the project of breaking down conventions of all kinds and 

especially of cutting through the accretion of conventional uses of language. With his 1965 novel 

Snow White, he turned to the ancient genre of the fairy tale to accomplish this goal. While many 

commentators on the novel claim that Barthelme’s treatment of the Snow White tale is merely 

parodic and negative, I maintain that the novel is actually quite positive in breaking through an 

objectified and rigid version of human Being in the character of Snow to a much more open horizon 

of possible Being. To make this point, I draw on central aspects of the thought of Martin Heidegger, 

who, perhaps more than that of any other philosopher, helped to create the zeitgeist through which 

postmodern American fiction emerges in the last half of the twentieth century. Specifically, 

Heidegger collapses the subject-object dualism of Descartes into the wholeness of Being itself and 

conceives for language the role not of simply re-presenting the world to human beings but rather 

of discovering, or “clearing,” Being itself.  

Barthelme chose wisely when he turned to fairy tale to explore new approaches to individual 

development and to the role of the individual in society. Evolving over centuries of oral, and later 

written, narratives, fairy tales serve as a “prism of the self,” reminding us of who we were and who 

we have the potential to become (Kolbenschlag 3). And they also persist in our cultural memory, 

“interpret[ing] crises of the human condition” and reflecting the “collective as well as individual 

experience” (3–4). Reaching back for centuries and spanning continents and cultures, fairy tales 

have been made famous by the familiar names of Charles Perrault, Hans Christian Anderson, the 

Brothers Grimm, and, of course, Walt Disney. We know these stories: from the opening line of 

“Once upon a time” to the closing words of “And they lived happily ever after,” virtually everyone 

in Western society has read or had read to her repeatedly the words of a fairy tale and believes that 

she knows precisely what to expect from one line to the next. Settled in plot and form, they use 

language in a formalized and predictable way. Indeed, as Swiss folklore scholar Max Lüthi has 

noted, “The pleasure of fairy tales resides in their form” (qtd. in Akins). 

Moreover, they possess the “spatial and temporal indeterminacy” that allows them to be “a 

forum for timeless ethical imperatives” (Pizer 336) while offering a simplistic and idealized 

representation of reality. Yet they are also always rhetorically situated in time and place, often 

reifying moral and nationalistic norms (336n5). While potentially comforting during any historical 



Barthelme and Heidegger  20 
 

era, such a form may appeal especially to persons in contemporary technological societies who 

may see it, if only temporarily, as “a way out of the burden of various different sorts of information 

forming one’s value system” (Kusnir 32) and for whom it may provide “a stability and order” that 

can replace “chaos and disorientation” (33).    

These fairy tale features—including the tradition of moral instruction, the aptness of the 

characters to symbolic interpretation, the settled and even rigidified status of the tale in traditional 

Western and contemporary popular culture, and the view of the world as idealized and so falsely 

accommodating to human beings—offer a highly structured and defined background from which 

to explore the world of mid-twentieth century America. As such, a number of the first generation 

of American postmodernists were inspired to adapt existing fairy tale motifs and conventions for 

their own rhetorical purposes. Along with Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme can be seen as the 

postmodern writer who most energetically embraced the genre, particularly in his 1965 novel Snow 

White. 

The tale of Snow White, with its beautiful young girl, a malicious older woman, and a 

combination of magic, evil, love, and transformation, has been called “one our most powerful 

cultural stories” (Tatar, The Annotated Brothers Grimm 243) and Snow White herself “the best 

known fairy-tale character in this country” (Tatar, The Classic Fairy Tales 70). Part of the 

classification type ATU 709 in the Aarne-Thompson-Uther system (Ashliman), it is widely 

believed that, in the European tradition, Snow White’s story has its roots in the Italian fabulist 

Giambattista Basile’s tale, “The Young Slave,” which is part of his 1634 framed collection entitled 

Il Pentamerone. While aspects of other tales—most notably Sleeping Beauty and Beauty and the 

Beast—can be discerned in this Basile story as well, the familiar Snow White elements are 

certainly there: a beautiful but bewitched girl, a jealous other, an absent male, and the triumph of 

justice and love.  

A second significant moment in the development of the tale comes several hundred years later 

in the form of another Italian version, “The Crystal Casket” (SurLalune Fairy Tales). Although 

this time the villain takes the form of Snow White’s teacher and the poison of choice is a hair comb 

rather than a dress, the storyline focuses more specifically on that which we have come to know 

as particularly Snow White’s.  

While most versions of the story prior to the nineteenth century were written for adults, 

beginning in 1812, the Grimm Brothers brought their tale of “Little Snow White” first to adults 

and later to children as well. Their version also solidifies the presence of Snow White’s 

housemates—who, prior to the Grimms’ re-telling, had appeared in variants as robbers, miners, 

and even as fairies (Ashliman)—by establishing their gender as male and their physical form as 

dwarves. While dwarves were a familiar type in Germanic tales, Snow White’s unnamed 

companions were also quite bawdy. Tidy in the extreme, they had no need of Snow’s domestic 

services; nonetheless, they urged her to stay, promising to “give you everything you need” (Tatar, 



21  Cullum 
 

CFT 84). And, of course, Walt Disney established the tale in the American consciousness with his 

1937 classic cartoon, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.  

Throughout the twentieth century, as Katalin Horn has described, there are at least four 

symbolic interpretations of the Snow White character that came to be seen as conventional. First, 

Snow White represents an initiate going through the “puberty rites” (275) from childhood to 

adulthood. Second, the story recapitulates “sexual phantasies, sexual problems and Oedipal 

conflict,” with the dwarves representing the “reduced but at least multiplied” “paternal penis” 

(275). Third, Bruno Bettelheim also interprets the tale as an Oedipal conflict, one in which the 

mother figure, the Queen, and the daughter, Snow White, come into inevitable conflict over 

jealousy of each other’s attractiveness to the father (203–4). And fourth, the story represents the 

“process of individuation,” in which the stepmother is both a “negative image of the mother” and 

also a part of Snow White as her “untrue femininity” (275).   

Interest in the Snow White tale and the re-affirmation or subverting of convention and standard 

interpretations of it have certainly not abated since Disney. Rather, to the extent that fairy tales are 

a form of popular culture and that “popular culture has become a ‘commodified product of late 

capitalist production’” (Jamison qtd. in Kusnir 32), the tale of Snow White too has morphed into 

visual images and products that have taken on a life of their own. This fact has only been amplified 

with the permeation of mass media into all aspects of daily human existence; for example, the 

popular ABC television show Once Upon a Time, which features Snow White as its lead character, 

garners almost seven million viewers each week (Once Upon a Fan). Moreover, it can be argued, 

as Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola does, that Barthelme’s novel follows popular cultural adaptations 

of the tale more than the older literary sources (7). And, in that context, L. L. Lee points out that 

the novel maintains “the sentimentality and falseness” of Walt Disney’s cartoon version precisely 

to “use” it as the “clichéd subject as well as target for attack” (181). 

Indeed, commentary about Barthelme’s use of the fairy tale covers a wide range of views: for 

example, that the novel “incorporates almost all … fairy tale elements [as outlined by Max Lüthi]” 

(Halden 147) and “fulfill[s] in its own special way the basic situation of the fairy tale” (Gilman 

30); that the novel “involves fantastications which bring the fairy-tale world into the modern one” 

(Flowers 33); that the novel is “not quite a fairy tale” (Lee 180) but that Barthelme “force[s] [fairy 

tale] structures upon the modern world, so that these structures are ‘real’, reflecting our world, and 

at the same moment ‘unreal’, lies about our world” (181); that the novel “uses “familiar characters 

and motifs in unfamiliar ways […] to achieve a parodic effect” (Herrero-Olaizola 7); that the novel 

“is a negative counterpart to Snow White as a fairy-tale, an antitype […]. A real negation or a 

reversion of the original Märchen” (Horn 273); and that the novel is an anti-fairy tale because it 

“suggest[s] the very impossibility” of the “unmediated moral stance” of the fairy tale form (Pizer 

336). All of these views share the sense, however, that the traditional tale serves as a starting point 

for Barthelme to perform his particular parodic magic on the tale, or, as Montresor puts it, that it 



Barthelme and Heidegger  22 
 

provides “a basic narrative framework on which to construct his deconstruction of contemporary 

America” (75). 

Much of the commentary about the novel sees Barthelme as being essentially negative, as seen 

in Horn’s view that the novel, “inverts the royal and magic surroundings [of the traditional fairy 

tale] into a desolate everyday scene of modern New York” (273). By undercutting the meaning 

expressed either literally or symbolically by the events of the traditional fairy tale plot, by creating 

characters who do not fulfill traditional fairy tale roles, and by structuring the novel in short, 

discrete units and using a dissociative narratorial voice, Barthelme is thus viewed by many readers 

as also undercutting meaning, purpose, and structure in human life.  

This undercutting is perceived in a number of ways. First, Barthelme is seen as denying the 

possibility of significant meaning of any kind. For example, the dwarves do not, as in the Disney 

film, “whistle while they work”; rather, as discussed by Lee, their work is “a series of empty 

gestures” (183). In fact, Lee claims that the novel as a whole “suggest[s] meaning” but finally 

“lack[s] content” (186). Pizer says bluntly that the novel “undermines all attempts to find a unified, 

coherent meaning within its narrative” (331). Second, Barthelme is seen as denying even a 

modicum of stability or clear purpose in the human psyche. Flowers, for instance, says that the 

characters engage merely in “psychological introspection” or “know thy neurosis” (35). And 

Halden finds that the prince-figure, Paul, evidences “a neurotic reluctance to accept a challenge” 

(148); that each dwarf “suffers individually” from “mental maladies and misunderstandings” 

(149); and that heroic action is replaced by “the ramblings of disturbed minds” (150). Third, 

Barthelme is seen to recapitulate this sense of rambling or dissociative thinking in the structure 

and the narratorial voice of the novel. Structurally, the novel is comprised of short units, usually 

of only one or two pages in length, that move one to another with little or no transition from the 

previous unit. Narratorially, most of these units present events or issues through the seeming point 

of view of one particular, yet unnamed and indistinguishable, character who, by the context, is 

presumably one of the dwarves and who speaks in either the first person singular, “I,” or the first 

person plural, “we.” Some other of these units are expressed by a third-person narrator who makes 

what are seemingly objective pronouncements that are nonetheless based on subjective judgment, 

such as “IT WAS NOT UNTIL THE 19TH CENTURY THAT RUSSIA PRODUCED A 

LITERATURE WORTHY OF THE WORLD’S CULTURAL HERITAGE” (Barthelme 149). 

Moreover, this same narrator can at times be seen as problematical in terms of the accuracy or 

reasonableness of the events narrated. In fact, Flowers goes so far as to state that “the omniscient 

narrator cannot be trusted” because of the “absurdity” of his narration of events (38). 

At the same time, however, most observers do acknowledge positive aspects of the novel to 

some degree. Halden, for instance, says that Barthelme “reinvigorates” the fairy tale, making it 

“real” for a contemporary audience (153). And virtually all commentators concede the comic 

quality of the novel, although often in qualified, off-key terms and phrases, such as “ironic” (Pizer 



23  Cullum 
 

337), “an amusingly refurbished fairy-tale novel of the absurd” (“Come Back, Brothers Grimm”), 

or “Essentially, there’s just one joke to grin at” (Adams BR4). In this more positive direction, a 

few readers even recognize the novel’s ability as parody to produce enhanced perspective. For 

example, using Linda Hutcheon’s views on parody--specifically, that parody “teaches us how the 

text we are reading is constructed” (7)—Herrero-Olaizola allows that the novel “invites a wider 

reading of Snow White’s story [and] this opens the possibility of a wider discursive spectrum” (7). 

And Kusnir, also citing Hutcheon on parody, specifically her point that postmodern parody is not 

“mocking” but “neutral” and has the intent of “showing a difference between […] past and 

contemporary representations of reality” (36), grants that the novel “emphasizes the plurality of 

discourses, worlds, and understandings of reality” (38). Such views that stress openness come 

closer to what I believe is actually the effect of Barthelme’s Snow White, that is, while negating or 

undercutting conventional or simplistic meaning, purpose, and structure in art or in human life, the 

novel also promotes the discovery of new meaning through its use of language.  

 

In making this point, I want to focus specifically on selected elements in the thought of Martin 

Heidegger. More than any other philosopher since Descartes, Heidegger succeeded in offering an 

alternative to the Cartesian dilemma, the fateful division of Being into the subjective and objective, 

that forced humans from their natural home on the earth and among others and into their own 

subjectivity as the only epistemological perspective possible. Descartes’s goal was to locate a 

foundation for science and ultimately for an understanding about the essence of human being itself. 

By locating this ground in the intellect—“cogito, ergo sum”—Descartes believed that he avoided 

the vagaries of the senses and of ordinary experience. However, the price of his locating this 

ground in the human intellect was to create a new dualism between the mind and the body, between 

the subjective and the objective, between “the world of intellectual intuition” and “the world of 

phenomenal experience” (Fell 4–5). In Being and Time, Heidegger defines “the entity which each 

of us is himself and which includes inquiring as one of the possibilities of its Being…by the term 

‘Dasein’” (27), or “Being-there” (27n1), “there” referring to Being-in-the-world. One of the 

“existentials,” or ways that Dasein is aware of itself as existing, is state-of-mind, which Heidegger 

defines as “our mood, our Being-attuned” to the world and to our past in it (172). One of the major 

characteristics of state-of-mind is “thrownness,” our “facticity,” the “that it is and has to be” of 

Dasein (174; emphasis in text), the things that we are physically, socially, and historically over 

which we have no control. In its thrownness, Dasein is already in the world. In terms of the 

question of a first cause or a ground to human being, then, Heidegger asserts the “impossibility of 

the metaphysical quest for a transcendental, nonrelative ground; the quest contradicts itself by 

being always already grounded in the experience of the absence of a final ground […] [T]he true 

and always-prior ground is the clearing, Dasein’s own Being-in-its-world” (Fell 58). In other 

words, the “primordially given ‘I’ or self is always and already part of the world; and indeed, a 



Barthelme and Heidegger  24 
 

world in which other persons are likewise given […] [T]he highly abstract and purely rational 

‘ego’ of the Cartesian metaphysics is a fiction” (Gelven 70–71). 

The connection of Heidegger’s thought, then, to Barthelme’s novel is profound. For the major 

issue explored in Snow White is precisely the relationship in art and language and in human life of 

the subjective to the objective. First, the most obvious case of this issue is the objectification of 

the character of Snow White herself. In the fairy tale, the character is objectified through the color 

white as a symbol of innocence, virginity, and purity, but also, as Tatar points out, through the 

identification of the medium of snow with coldness and remoteness (The Annotated Brothers 

Grimm 240). In addition, when she is in the coffin, the anesthetized Snow White combines these 

symbolic aspects of purity and remoteness with passivity and etherealness. Furthermore, as 

discussed, interpretatively, Snow White has been seen as symbolic of social/sexual rites of 

passage, the maturation/individuation process, and various psychological states, in particular, 

versions of the Oedipal drama. In Barthelme’s novel, this objectification goes even further. As 

Jeffrey Nealon has discussed, the novel enacts “a critique based on the violence of the masculinist 

appropriative gaze that masquerades as mere appreciation” (128). From the very first page of the 

novel, on which her beauty marks are described and displayed graphically as black bullets 

vertically aligned on the page, Snow White is portrayed by the ostensibly male narratorial voice 

as a sexual object. As shown by the focus on these beauty marks, the character of Snow White is 

seen as “nothing more than a collection of fetishized zones” (129). When Dan addresses the other 

dwarves about their mutual concern about Snow White’s threatened discontent with their unusual 

sexual arrangement, he takes this objectification to a comically logical, if insultingly crass and 

sexist, extreme: 

 

what do we apprehend when we apprehend Snow White? […] first, two three-

quarter scale breasts floating toward us wrapped, typically, in a red towel. Or, […] 

we apprehend a beautiful snow-white arse floating away from us wrapped in a red 

towel. […] what, in these two quite distinct apprehensions, is the constant?….Why, 

quite simply, the red towel. […] we can easily dispense with […] Snow White, and 

cleave instead to the towel. (Barthelme 106–07) 

 

Similarly, Paul, the prince-figure, has an objectifying reaction to Snow White as he stares through 

her window looking “at her bare breasts” (154) like, in his own term, a “voyeur” (155): “God 

Almighty […]. She is just like one of those dancers one sees from time to time on Bourbon Street 

in New Orleans” (154), that is, an exotic dancer. In going beyond Cartesian dualism, Heidegger 

warns against this tendency to see human beings—others and even the bodily aspects of the self—

in objective terms. In fact, it would be reasonable to say that the thrust of Heidegger’s project in 

Being and Time may be characterized as his attempt to define and separate the ontological, that 



25  Cullum 
 

which has to do with being itself, from the ontic, that which has to do with beings as entities. As 

Gelven explains, “the greatest barrier in [making explicit our own existence] […] is the natural 

tendency of mind […] to render the self as an object. For the question we are asking is a question 

of the process or activity of existing, not what it is that exists. […] not what kind of thing a being 

is, but what it means to be at all” (23–24; emphasis in text). 

Snow White clearly understands that there is a particular role that she is expected to play, and 

that this role is objectified and sexist. To a degree, she even attempts to fulfill this role: “What 

does she hope for? ‘Someday my prince will come.’ By this Snow White means that she lives her 

own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will ‘complete’ her” (Barthelme 76). Yet 

within this seeming acceptance of her role, she has stirrings of restlessness: “…it is terrific to be 

anticipating a prince […] but it is still waiting, and waiting as a mode of existence is […] a 

darksome mode. I would rather be doing a hundred other things” (83). This restlessness becomes 

doubt: “Is there a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui 

and pain?” (108). Snow White goes on to respond to her situation with “anger at male domination 

of the physical world” (137) and with a sense that the fairy tale world has changed and can no 

longer “supply the correct ending to the story” (138). Finally, she confronts the issue of 

objectification head on. After disrobing and examining herself candidly, “tak[ing] stock” and 

finding, in sexist terms, “nothing but praise for this delicious assortment” (150), she expresses, in 

explicitly Cartesian terms, her awareness too of the larger difficulty with such objectification: “The 

curious physicality of my existence here on Earth is related to both parts of the mind-body problem, 

the mind part and the body part” (150). She even ponders a kind of pasting over of this dualism: 

“Although I secretly know that my body is my mind. The way it acts sometimes, spontaneously 

and scandalously hurling itself into the arms of bad situations, with never a care for who is 

watching or real values” (150–151). What she describes is actually still a priority of body and 

instinct over mind in the form of physical desire, rather than a Heideggerian authenticity. The Self, 

Heidegger says, “is […] for the most part inauthentic, the they-self” (225). The “they-self” is an 

aspect of the existential of fallenness, which Heidegger defines as “an absorption of Being-with-

one-another,” or “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’” (220). In and of itself, fallenness into 

the world is not a negative quality; it is simply one mode of being. But to the degree that it becomes, 

in Heidegger’s term, “a constant temptation” (221) to Dasein to turn away from its own selfhood, 

fallenness is a potential problem for personal identity. Fallenness is in its basic aspect what 

Heidegger terms “inauthentic.” Inauthenticity also is not a categorically negative quality, but rather 

simply a part of Being in the world. Heidegger contrasts the inauthentic Self to “the authentic 

Self—that is, […] the Self which has been taken hold of in its own way” (167; emphasis in text). 

One comes to authenticity through the existential of understanding, which Heidegger defines as 

“the phenomenological basis for seeing [possibility] as a disclosive potentiality-for-Being” (183). 

In these terms, Snow White is still struggling with the fallenness of following a role assigned to 



Barthelme and Heidegger  26 
 

her by society or the “they-self” and has not reached the point of making an authentic choice of 

her own future. However, the discontent, and, more specifically, the “dread” that precipitates the 

self’s recognition of possibility is stirring in Snow White. “Dread” is the term that Heidegger uses 

to describe that state of mind that makes us “aware of what is […]. We are thrown in a world. 

Dread brings us face to face with this thrownness” (Gelven 118; emphasis in text). For Heidegger, 

dread can be a catalyst for an individual to confront his own future cessation and therefore his 

ability to make choices that affect that future, that is, to be authentic. At the start of the final section, 

Part Three, of the novel, Snow White faces dread: “It is true that there is a future in which I shall 

inevitably perish” (Barthelme 142). As part of this confrontation, she reaches a new understanding 

of her lot, “[…] what is, is insufficient,” and begins to make choices, “From now on I deny myself 

to them” (141). While Snow White cannot be said to have become fully authentic because she does 

not take her fate completely into her own hands, she can be said to reject the previously inauthentic 

sexist, objectified role into which she has been cast as part of her thrownness—she originates, after 

all, as a fairy tale character—and thus to have begun the process of authentic being, a process 

which she does not quite reach within the confines of the novel and its fairy tale context but does 

nevertheless aspire to, as reflected at the end of the novel with her “apotheosis” or “ris[ing] into 

the sky” (187). 

The second major form of objectification in the novel involves language itself. Snow White 

reacts to her condition of discontent through confusion about her own role but also, significantly, 

through the role of language in creating reality, as when she laments, “OH I wish there were some 

words in the world that were not the words I always hear!” (12). These words that she “always 

hear[s]” are largely stagnant and unsatisfying in terms of her expectations not only as a 

conventional female fairy tale character, but also as an unconventional 1960’s American female 

housekeeper and shower room companion of seven men. The common factor in her dissatisfaction 

would seem to be, then, the sexism of both situations. And Snow White relates this sexism 

specifically to the function of language in her short tirade about the male power expressed in the 

naming of, appropriately, physical objects: “Oh if I could just get my hands on the man who 

dubbed those electrical connections male and female […]. And if I could just get my hands on the 

man who called that piece of pipe a nipple” (137). Essentially, her point and hope are that old 

words produced the sexist circumstances that she finds unacceptable and that new words can 

change those circumstances. That she is searching for such words is implied in her own activity of 

writing a poem, that is, of finding, creating her own words to give her life a different orientation. 

Cristina Bacchilega has examined this point, following Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s 

particularly feminist interpretation of the mirror in the original fairy tale as embodying the male 

voice and its controlling power: “Confronted with the failure of the script she has been handed, 

Snow White self-consciously decides to write her own and […] challenges the framing power of 

the mirror” (14). 



27  Cullum 
 

Language, however, looms much larger in the novel than its effect on a single character. The 

status of language affects the entire society, as seen in Dan’s famous disquisition on the “trash 

phenomenon” and its relation to language. Since the “endless” and “sludge qualities” of “ordinary 

language” have, like the “per-capita production of trash in this country,” continued to escalate 

substantially and will “soon” achieve “a point where it’s 100 percent.” Given that fact, a society 

can be “blanketed” with and linguistically incapacitated by this “sludgy” language or it can “learn 

how to ‘dig it’” (Barthelme 102–103), that is, to use it in new and positive modes. A number of 

commentators focus on this image of “the trash phenomenon” and this point about the power of 

language used aesthetically. Lee, for example, says that “Words can cover over reality, that is, 

create an actuality that is false, but they can also create and report the ‘real’ which breaks down 

isolation—this is the act of the artist” (183). Richard Gilman, one of the first to comment on the 

novel in a perceptive early review, declares that in Snow White “literature itself is made to expose 

the bankruptcy of its traditional, normative procedures, so that new literature might be formed on 

dead ground” (32). And Larry McCaffery famously observed that Barthelme’s “process […] can 

be likened to a ‘recycling approach’ in which the drek of familiar, banal language is charged with 

a renewed freshness via the mysterious sea-change of art” (121). 

In terms of my discussion, though, I want to bring in Heidegger’s concept of language to explain 

how Barthelme’s approach can be seen to be even greater than the “reporting” of the real, the 

exposure of the bankruptcy of old and the creation of new literature, or the “renewal” of banal 

language that these commentators claim. For, in fact, Barthelme’s language does nothing less than 

actually expand being itself. That is, essentially, Barthelme’s approach to language recapitulates 

Heidegger’s emphasis on the ontological power of language. Specifically, in “On the Essence of 

Truth,” Heidegger discusses the traditional Western concept of truth as the correspondence of, 

first, a statement that is made, or presented, in relation to, second, the thing about which the 

statement is made. This thing, then, stands apart as an object in what Heidegger calls “a field of 

opposedness” that “takes place within an open region” (121). Heidegger says further that whatever 

is in this “open region” is “not first created by the presenting but rather is only entered into and 

taken over as a domain of relatedness” (121). This relationship of human beings to other beings 

and objects, which Heidegger terms the “openness of comportment” (122), then, can be seen as 

the more elemental basis for truth than propositional statement, for “only through [the openness of 

comportment] can what is opened up […] become the standard for the presentative 

correspondence” (122). Heidegger then connects truth from this openness to freedom and then to 

the Greek word aletheia, or “unconcealment” (125), to arrive at the following definition: “‘Truth’ 

is not a feature of correct propositions that are asserted of an ‘object’ by a human ‘subject’ and 

then are ‘valid’ […]; rather, truth is disclosure of beings through which an openness essentially 

unfolds” (127). This unfolding, as Heidegger states in “The Origin of the Work of Art,” takes place 

in and through language: “Language, by naming beings for the first time, first brings beings to 



Barthelme and Heidegger  28 
 

word and to appearance” (198). And in his famous depiction in “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger 

says that “Thinking accomplishes the relation of Being to the essence of man […] solely as 

something handed over to it from Being. Such offering consists in the fact that in thinking Being 

comes to language. Language is the house of being. In its home man dwells. Those who think and 

those who create with words are the guardians of this home” (217). Thus, it is through language 

that human beings “clear […] Being itself” (230). It is in this sense, then, that Alan Wilde, perhaps 

the most perceptive of postmodern critics, includes Barthelme in his category of “generative 

ironists,” whose use of language performs “broadly creative functions” (157).  

 

 

Works Cited 

  

Adams, Robert Martin. 1967. “With English On the English.” New York Times 21 May: BR4. 

ProQuest. Accessed August 23, 2014.  

Akins, Ellen. 2015. “Tales Retold: Something Old, Something New.” Ellen Akins. 

http://ellenakins.com/tales-retold-something-old-something-new/. January 21. Accessed 

February 19, 2015.  

Ashliman, D. L. 2014. Snow-White. 1998–2013. http://www.pitt.edu/~dash/type0709.html. 

Accessed June 12, 2014. 

Bacchilega, Cristina. 1988. “Cracking the Mirror Three Re-Visions of ‘Snow White.’” 

boundary 2 15/16: 1–25.  

Barthelme, Donald. 1967. Snow White. New York: Atheneum. Reprint New York: Simon & 

Schuster, 1996.  

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