What Is The Mood Of The Balloon

Donald Barthelme’s “The Balloon” is a short story about a narrator who inflates a balloon over Manhattan causing multiple reactions from the community. Yet to define it as simply a short story is quite risky. Barthelme’s text plays with and deviates from the traditional conventions of literature. In his “Introduction” to Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, David Gates explains how it is difficult to place Barthelme’s work in a specific genre because it “skitters away from any genre..including the so-called metafiction”(xii). His work challenges philosopher Jacque Derrida’s claim mentioned in Daniel Chandler’s “An Introduction to Genre Theory” that “a text cannot belong to no genre, it cannot be without...a genre”(Chandler 6). This may

The first and last paragraph is in first person point of view. The narrator is also a character in the story since he is the one who inflated the balloon. He presents the balloon to the readers in a calm and expressionless tone as if a balloon that “expanded northward all night” and covered the sky of Manhattan is something normal (Barthelme 46). The narrator’s tone suggests that the readers should also see the balloon expanding as something normal. The narrator’s voice is rather controlling as well: “There, I stopped it” and seeing no reason why the balloon should not expand more, he asked “the engineers to see to it” (Barthelme 46). He makes it clear that he has control over the balloon. But the controlling voice disappears after the first paragraph and the style of narration shifts. The narrator acts like a reporter when he states that “they were reactions” towards the balloon (46). Other word choices such as “it must be judged a calm, mature one,” “it was agreed,” and “it was suggested” and the snippets of the “critical opinions” contribute to an objective tone (47). Through this shift in the way narration is presented in this story, not only does the reader forget that the narrator had a personal voice, an “I,” but also forget that he invented the balloon. Like other ekphrastic pieces we’ve read such as Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess,” little attention is given to the artist. Like the

What can the audience create out of this balloon? The public attempt to transform this mute object into verbal meaning. One man might view it as if it “were part of a system of unanticipated rewards”(48). Others might introduce concepts such as “dream and responsibility” and its relation to an inflated balloon (49). As W.J.T. Mitchell argues in “Representation,” when we begin to “use representations in any social situation: representation begins to play a double role, as a means of communication” and as a means of miscommunication as well (Mitchell l3). But the narrator not only denounces the balloon as a representation of situations earlier on, he also explains that the meaning of the balloon “could never be known absolutely”(47). The narrator informs the reader that the balloon covering the skies in Manhattan is not a “situation”(Barthelme 46). It is not something related to plot: “sets of circumstances leading to some resolution, some escape of tension”(Barthelme 47). In fact, he uses plots and characters as “good old tropes”(Gates xii). Barthelme plays with the way representation and fiction works. The balloon does not signify or “stands for one other thing” (Mitchell 13). It is not represented as a “social situation”(13). It is what it represents to an individual rather than to a whole society. For certain