Summary John Barth's return to the short story after ah absence of almost 30 years in the genre has been heralded by the publication of two collections of short stories. Both collections signify a valuable building block in his life-long encyclopaedic project on the origin of fiction, its viability and its survival. In vintage-Barth style, narration is theorised and theory is narrativised in the self-conscious short narratives. Playing with different narrative levels helps Barth in teasing out what constitutes a story, what constitutes the ground truths of narrative theory. The narrative process is defined as a complex (or chaotic) system of suspended, yet incessant, motion. Thus the narrative process is simultaneously linear and non-linear. In the second collection we find the author also questioning the function of (apparently) trivial stories in the aftermath of 9/11. Storytelling may be a distraction from catastrophe, but it is not an escape. It is conceived of as a life-giving urge, while its function in times of crisis is to reassert the human capability to shape the world.
