Snow White by Donald Barthelme
Published 1967 · 192 pages · 28,819 words · about 3 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Postmodern Fiction, Satire
How hard is Snow White to read?
Snow White scores 79 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 62 out of 100
- Barthelme deploys a wide and deliberately dissonant lexicon: archaic terms (palinode, felucca, chiffonier, escritoire), French phrases (quelle tragédie, naturellement, de trop, tendresse, simpatico), pseudo-medieval constructions, and contemporary American slang (heigh-ho, sucking the mop) sharing the same paragraphs. The collision of registers is itself the point — no single vocabulary is allowed to establish authority. Less opaque than Gravity's Rainbow but far more eclectic than standard literary fiction of the period.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Barthelme alternates between punchy declarative fragments ('That is the essential point here, that she wasn't satisfied') and free-associative runs of embedded clauses, especially in the men's speculative group voice. The mock-trial transcript deploys clipped legalese; Snow White's interior monologue uses suspended elliptical syntax ('HOUSE . . . WALLS . . . WHEN HE DOESN'T . . . I'M NOT . . .'). No sentence approaches Faulkner's 1000-word constructions, but the constant register-switching keeps syntax from ever becoming navigable in a sustained way.
- Abstraction: 75 out of 100
- The novel operates on multiple simultaneous levels of abstraction — fairy-tale allegory, feminist critique, consumer capitalism satire, existential commentary — without ever settling on one. Interspersed with narrative are outright philosophical set-pieces: a textbook-style digression on the English Romantics, a formal analysis of Snow White's psychological state ('Snow White lives her own being as incomplete, pending the arrival of one who will complete her'), and a reader questionnaire that makes the novel's metafictional program explicit. Closer to Waiting for Godot's existential abstraction than to the grounded social realism of The Great Gatsby.
- Information density: 72 out of 100
- Each page carries concurrent satirical, allegorical, and pop-cultural freight. A single paragraph can encompass baby food brand names, an allusion to Mao's Hundred Flowers campaign, group therapy vocabulary, and an embedded quotation from a 19th-century Romantic poet. The mid-novel questionnaire is a pure density spike, operating simultaneously as structural experiment, critique of reading conventions, and satirical commentary on consumer feedback culture. Comparable in layering to 2666's historical accumulation, though lighter in page weight.
- Narrative indirection: 82 out of 100
- Almost nothing about Snow White's inner life is stated directly; it must be reconstructed from displaced gestures — flowers moved from one bowl to another, a four-page poem she refuses to share, curtly ambiguous answers to the men's questions. The men's speculative group voice ('We speculate that...', 'We are certain she has assumed that') constantly foregrounds the gap between behavior and meaning. Readers must also assemble the novel's fairy-tale mapping from scattered cues — no character is labeled by role.
- Symbolic density: 85 out of 100
- Every major object and action carries allegorical weight: Snow White's black hair dangling from the window as sexual invitation and feminist protest; the vats of Chinese baby food as the men's capitalist labor substituting for authentic relationship; Paul's death by poisoned vodka Gibson as the fairy tale's prince-rescue inverted and rendered lethal. The novel is structured as a systematic symbolic deconstruction of the Grimm source text, but the symbolism never resolves into a stable code — the hair means different things to every character who sees it.
- Ironic distance: 82 out of 100
- Barthelme maintains near-total ironic distance throughout. The men's therapy-speak and speculative commentary mock psychological jargon while also using it as genuine interpretive framework. Bill's grandiose self-narration is simultaneously self-aware and self-deceived. The reader questionnaire makes the irony structural: 'Do you feel that the creation of new modes of hysteria is a viable undertaking for the artist of today? Yes / No.' Comparable to Pale Fire's gap between surface text and implied critique.
- Resolution withholding: 85 out of 100
- The ending is announced in advance via chapter header ('THE FAILURE OF SNOW WHITE'S ARSE REVIRGINIZATION OF SNOW WHITE APOTHEOSIS OF SNOW WHITE') — a technique that forecloses suspense while compounding interpretive difficulty. Paul dies without having rescued anyone; Bill is hanged; Snow White casts chrysanthemums on Paul's grave 'although there is nothing in it for her, that grave.' The men depart 'in search of a new principle.' Nothing is resolved, including whether the novel's own satirical program succeeded.
- Structural complexity: 84 out of 100
- The novel comprises over 25 chapters operating on entirely different formal principles: realist group narration, interior monologue, all-caps textbook headers, a formal reader questionnaire with checkboxes, mock-trial transcript, stream-of-consciousness fragments ('WHY AM I . . . GLASS . . . HUNCHED AGAINST THE WELL . . .'), flashbacks labeled as such, and capsule summary headings that precede events. No two consecutive sections are governed by the same rules. Comparable in formal variety to the discontinuous fragments of Flights, though more consistently readable.
How Snow White is regarded
Snow White holds a literary regard score of 70 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.