Views of My Father Weeping by Donald Barthelme
"Views of My Father Weeping" is a complex narrative by Donald Barthelme that explores themes of grief, identity, and the nature of truth through the lens of a son's relationship with his father. The story is framed around the death of the narrator's father, who is reported to have been killed in an accident involving an aristocrat's carriage. However, the narrative structure is non-linear and fragmented, incorporating interjections that present various, often absurd, views of the father weeping. These interlineations suggest that the father’s emotional state is deeply intertwined with the son's search for meaning about their relationship, blurring the lines between reality and fabrication.
The story features a mix of characters, including witnesses to the father's death and female figures who guide the narrator in his quest for understanding. The narrator grapples with conflicting accounts of the accident, reflecting on the nature of memory and perception. The juxtaposition of the weeping father and his more whimsical, absurd actions invites readers to contemplate the complexities of familial bonds and the often painful quest for identity. Ultimately, the narrative culminates in an ambiguous conclusion, represented by the word "Etc.," signaling an endless cycle of questioning and reflection on the father-son dynamic.
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Views of My Father Weeping by Donald Barthelme
First published: 1970
Type of plot: Antistory
Time of work: A timeless present
Locale: Unspecified
Principal Characters:
The unnamed narrator , who may or may not be telling a story about the life and death of his fatherLars Bang , the coachman, who may or may not have recounted a story of the death of the narrator's fatherA little girl , who witnesses the death of the father
The Story
In "Views of My Father Weeping," there is no realistic plot line based in the conventions of cause and effect and set in some existing time and space. Rather, Donald Barthelme presents the reader with a story about the supposed death of a narrator's father combined with interlineations that present alternating views of a father weeping. To complicate the matter even further, the story about the death of the father may or may not be true because the coachman, who storifies the experience, is reported to be a "bloody liar." In addition, the juxtaposition in the story of the narrator to the coachman suggests a doubling of the two men, an identification that makes the narrator a "bloody liar," too.
Asterisks separate thirty-five paragraphs that constitute the story. Paragraphs range from twenty-five lines to one line, the shortest being the last, which consists of one abbreviated word, "Etc.," which brings the reader back to the beginning of the story in an endless circle or a series of infinite regressions. The retrograde character of the action is consistent with the interlineations where "regression" operates in psychoanalytic terms to suggest a return of the libido to earlier stages of development or to infantile objects of attachment in the case of both father and son.
The opening of the story consists of two sentences establishing a possibly factual situation: "An aristocrat was riding down the street in his carriage. He ran over my father." The presence of an "aristocrat" in a "carriage" suggests a period when noblemen were driven about in coaches by liveried coachmen. The place of the accident, in King's New Square, together with references to the nobleman, the Lensgreve Aklefeldt, a count who lives at 17 rue du Bac, suggests a European setting. On the other hand, the interlineations refer to, among other things, mail carriers, insurance salespeople, armadillos, Ford Mustangs, television, and the American plains in such a way as to identify a setting in modern times in the United States. Furthermore, in the interlineations, the father is alive, if aged and continually weeping.
The tie between the storified experience concerning the death of the father and the interlineations is the narrator. In the storified experience, the narrator is searching for the "truth" about the killing of his father. In the interlineations, the narrator is searching for the "truth" about his feelings for his father, which will result in his own ego identity.
Having been notified by the police of the accidental death of his father by a hit-and-run carriage, the narrator seeks witnesses to the occurrence so that he can determine for himself the real conditions of his father's death. The first witness that the narrator finds is a little girl, eleven or twelve years old, who says that she witnessed only part of the accident because part of the time she had her back turned. She identifies the man in the carriage as an aristocrat. Later this little girl will inexplicably turn up at the narrator's door to tell him the name of the coachman who was driving the aristocrat's carriage.
The little girl is the first of three females who give the narrator some kind of guidance in his search for his father's executioner. A woman named Miranda will tell the narrator how to get inside the aristocratic quarters where the nobleman lives and how to present himself to the inhabitants of the great house. Another woman makes final comment on the story the coachman, Lars Bang, finally tells the narrator. This woman is the one who points out that "Bang is an absolute bloody liar." The only other female in the story is the narrator's mother, who apparently is at some distance from her husband and son because she is not present at the burial, and the son telephones her with the news of his father's death.
Stories told to the narrator by various witnesses to the accident differ. According to the witnesses, either the father was drunk and was himself the cause of the accident or the driver was at fault because he could have avoided the collision had he tried. The narrator says that he smelled no alcohol on his father at the scene of the accident. Lars Bang, in telling his version of the story, says the father was thoroughly drunk and attacked the horses in such a way as to cause them to rear in fright and to run headlong over the father, dragging him forty feet over the cobblestones. Bang says that he tried but could not stop the horses.
The interlineations present the distress of a son with a father who cannot control his weeping. The fact that the son is not sure that the weeping father is his own suggests an archetypal father figure who may be "Tom's father, Phil's father, Pat's father, Pete's father, Paul's father." This archetypal figure desires in the son's mind to be thanked for his contribution to the life of the son and worshiped by the son in the manner demanded by a god. The son alternately sees himself before his father in a ceaseless attitude of painful supplication and as his father's avenger, someone who, if only he knew what was causing his father to weep, could try to do something about it:
Father, please! . . . look at me, Father . . . who has insulted you? . . . are you, then, compromised? . . . ruined . . . a slander is going around? . . . an obloquy? . . . a traducement? . . . 'sdeath! . . . I won't permit it! . . . I won't abide it! . . . I'll . . . move every mountain . . . climb . . . every river . . . etc.
Juxtaposed to images of the father weeping are images of the father not weeping but in absurd situations, such as straddling a very large dog, writing on a white wall with crayons, shaking pepper into a sugar bowl, knocking down dolls' furniture in a doll's house, and playing shoot-'em-up with his son with real guns.
Both lines of narration—the storified experience of the death of the father and the interlineal comments on and description of the behavior of the weeping father—come to the same conclusion, expressed in the final paragraph: "Etc."
Bibliography
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