The Glass Mountain – Donald Barthelme’s four-page postmodern sudden fiction written in one hundred clear, concise steps – completely straight-forward and easy-to-follow, very much like a typical instruction manual for all those affordable consumer goods back in 1970 when the story was originally published, things like directions for setting up your television set, assembling your barbecue grill or installing your air conditioner. However, when we look carefully at the content of each step – that’s when the real literary fun begins.

Since Donald Barthelme plays off of the traditional European fairy tale The Glass Mountain, it is good to be familiar with the original (link to Andrew Lang’s 1889 rendering below). The story, in brief, runs as follows: There was once a glass mountain with a golden castle on top. In front of the castle was a tree with golden apples. If someone picked a golden apple, they would be able to enter the castle wherein an enchanted princess lived. Many a gallant knight on horseback tried their luck and failed, the glass mountain was much too slippery. One brave knight almost made it to the top but an eagle guarding the golden apple tree clawed his horse’s face and thus both rider and horse tumbled down the mountain to their death.

Then at last there came a brave schoolboy with a good heart who killed a lynx and attached the lynx’s claws to his feet and hands to climb the mountain. When the eagle attacked him and dug its talons into his skin, the schoolboy was carried up to the top. Then the schoolboy cut off the eagle’s feet and landed on the golden apple tree.

He used one apple to heal his wounds and threw another apple at a dragon guarding the castle door causing the dragon to disappear. He married the princess and thereafter discovered the blood that flowed to the base of the glass mountain from the now dead eagle magically brought the knights and horses back to life and everybody lived happily ever after.

Turning to Donald Barthelme’s version, instead of some enchanted fairy land, we have a young man climbing a glass mountain at the busy intersection of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue in Greenwich Village, Manhattan; instead of a lynx’s claws, he has climbing irons on his feet and a plunger in each hand (if the suction is good enough to unclog your toilet then the suction must certainly be good enough to cling to a glass mountain); instead of just fallen knights and horses at the base of the mountain, there are his acquaintances passing around a brown bottle and shouting up at him: “Shithead.” “Asshole.” “Dumb motherfucker.” Ah, New York. There are also hundreds of young people shooting up on drugs while older people walk their dogs. Someone asks if he’ll make a splash when he falls, to which another person replies that he hopes he'll be around when it happens.


The view the narrator would have in that area of the city at 200 feet above the street. Not exactly what the schoolboy saw in the traditional tale.

Classic postmodern fiction since reading from 1 to 100 is an exercise in those three prime pomo qualities - paradox, irony and fragmentation. Huge emphasis on fragmentation in this Donald Barthelme tale. For example: “58. Does one climb a glass mountain, at considerable personal discomfort simply to disenchant a symbol? 59. Do today’s stronger egos still need symbols? 60. I decided that the answer to these questions was “yes.” 61. Otherwise what was I doing there, 206 feet above the power-sawed elms, whose white meat I could see from my height? 62. The best way to fail to climb the mountain is to be a knight in full armor – one whose horse’s hoofs strike fiery sparks from the side of the mountain.”

Modern artists exerted a profound influence on the aesthetic of Barthelme's storytelling, artists like Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. The juxtaposition of disparate, incongruent, contrasting images, quick slides from the elegance of fairy tale to the hard edges of urban shabbiness, as from the sparkling blue-white depths of the glass mountain to many people with disturbed eyes down on the street; or shifting focus from all the stinking dogshit on the sidewalks to the dogshit’s vivid colors as if set out on a painter's pallet: ocher, umber, Mars yellow, sienna, viridian, ivory black, rose madder - such combinations bring to mind a Robert Rauschenberg collage.


Robert Rauschenberg, 1985, Venus Over Manhattan

Why construct a story in this manner? Does the author judge more traditional literary conventions in need of a fresh shot of energy, an expansion of vision similar in spirit to the way American abstract expressionists and pop artists expanded painting? Additionally, is there a cynical social or political statement being made here? Irrespective of how we answer these questions, by my way of thinking, one thing is certain: such postmodern fiction is a celebration of human imagination and creativity.

The narrator talks about his motive for climbing the glass mountain in the first place - to disenchant a symbol. We can take this to mean freeing others from illusion or misperception, illusion revolving around a symbol. But what enchanted symbol does he have in mind? Is the enchanted symbol a powerful symbol the way the American flag is a powerful symbol for Americans? Should we think of his disenchanting a symbol in a similar way the artist Jasper Johns disenchanted the American flag by incorporating the flag into his paintings? I invite a reader to ponder these questions, particularly in light of the unexpected, somewhat disturbing twist at the end of Barthelme’s postmodern retelling of this traditional fairy tale.


Jasper Johns, 1955, White Flag

Link to Donald Barthelme's The Glass Mountain: http://jessamyn.com/barth/glassmountain.html

Link to the traditional fairy tale - The Glass Mountain: http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/lfb/ye/yefb20.htm

A recently made animated short film based on Donald Barthelme's The Glass Mountain: https://vimeo.com/94027019


Jackson Square, Greenwich Village, New York City, located at the intersection of Thirteenth Street and Eighth Avenue.


Jackson Square in 1892, triangular in shape rather than an actual square. Can you picture Donald Barthelme's glass mountain rising up in this space? ( )