Let me begin with an admission: I was initially reluctant to write a review of this four-page piece of Donald Barthelme experimental fiction since I didn’t find the author’s usual reference to literature, philosophy or the arts, and, even more to the point, I had difficulty getting my mind around the story - in a word, I was coming up with a blank when I asked myself: Why did Barthelme write this? Is there a deeper, underlying meaning I should be grasping?

I mean, take a look at the three bodyguards in the above photo. Do these gentleman strike you as members of the literary scene or art crowd? I was on the cusp of moving on to the next piece in my Penguin collection of forty Barthelme stories, but then, fanfare with horns – Salman Rushdie to the rescue.

After listening to Salman read and discuss the story (link below), I have blended my own reflections with his and have come up with the following themes and highlights any reader can have fun considering:

Point of View: With a series of sharply focused questions, Donald Barthelme lets readers inhabit the world of a bodyguard, a world forever shrouded in uncertainty and suspicion, a world where, in order to perform his job, he is always interrogating all aspects of what he encounters moment to moment. Does anybody in the crowd look like they have a weapon? Is there a sniper on a rooftop or at an open window in one of the buildings?

Questions: Nearly every sentence in the story is posed as a question. Who is asking all of these questions? Is it the bodyguard himself or Donald Barthelme as he writes the story? Or, are we as readers being asked these questions? It appears the identity of the questioner can slide from bodyguard to author to reader, back and forth, and, on occasion, can embrace all three. As Salman observes, many of the questions are rhetorical and answer themselves.

Action Drives Plot: Does this story contain an event? Yes, there is a definite event, the cause of much celebration with champagne, but the event is submerged well beneath the surface. I agree with Salman Rushdie – Donald Barthelme is one of the few authors where indirection and obscurity can be employed as a definite virtue. And there was a time in his life when Salman had his own direct experience with bodyguards and members of the secret police so he speaks with authority when he observes that a bodyguard is doing their job when nothing happens, when there is no drama. No drama means a job well done - exactly the opposite of a fiction writer!

Postmodern Absurdity: In the next to last paragraph we read: “Stilt-walkers weaving ten feet above the crowd in great papier-mâché bird heads, black and red costumes, whipping thirty feet of colored cloth above the heads of the crowd, miming the rape of a young female personage symbolizing his country?” Ironically, such zany street theater can be extremely effective to incite a crowd. Now the bodyguard can quickly be faced with an explosion of violence. Thus, does this short tale become an instance of postmodern absurdity in form rather than in content?

A Reader's Comfort Zone: Is such fiction meant to test a reader’s conventional sense of boundaries? Stated another way, when reading such an oddly constructed story, are we being asked to expand our literary horizons? We come to know in small measure the personal life of an individual bodyguard as he goes about doing his job but is this really adequate? Perhaps Donald Barthelme is asking us to be as cool and as removed as an actual bodyguard!

Satisfying Ending: Empty champagne bottles overflow garbage cans throughout the entire country. Bad news for the bodyguard since the prime question is: “Which bodyguard is at fault?” This might be a satisfying ending to the story for a reader but it most certainly is not a satisfying end for the bodyguard, even if he or any of his fellow bodyguards are not at fault in the least.

Salman Rushdie reads Donald Barthelme's Concerning the Bodyguard, and discusses the story with New Yorker fiction editor, Deborah Treisman. Link: http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/fiction/salman-rushdie-reads-donald-barthelme

Link to Donald Barthelme's Concerning the Bodyguard: https://biblioklept.org/2013/09/20/concerning-the-bodyguard-donald-barthelme/

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