She is a tall dark beauty containing a great many beauty spots: one above the breast, one above the belly, one above the knee, one above the ankle, one above the buttock, one on the back of the neck. All of these are on the left side, more less in a row, as you go up and down.
The opening lines are not exactly what you would expect from a story about Snow White. A “dark beauty” is not the way most people likely imagine Snow White; it implies menace and mystery rather than the pure, simple princess from the original fairytale. The beauty spots also corrupt the image of a "clean," pure Snow White. Additionally, a series of vertically arranged asterisks follow these words, and this immediately establishes the novel's experimental techniques. Rather than a standard series of sentences, a visual depiction of the description disrupts the page. The reader is immediately forced to accept a novel that isn't traditional.
QUESTIONS:
1. Do you like the story so far? Yes ( ) No ( )
2. Does Snow White resemble the Snow White you remember? Yes ( ) No ( )
3. Have you understood, in reading to this point, that Paul is the prince-figure? Yes ( ) No ( )
4. That Jane is the wicked stepmother-figure? Yes ( ) No ( )
The end of Part I is a questionnaire. There are, in total, 15 questions, and question 10 actually calls for a mini-essay of twenty-five words or less (88). The questions outline many facts about the novel that haven't been explicit, like the role of Jane as the stepmother. It also directly addresses the reader and makes the novel metatextual, since it explicitly acknowledges that the novel is a novel. The questions become more absurd throughout the questionnaire, asking random details about the reader's opinion about shoulders and the Author's Guild. It establishes, once more, the novel's rejection of standard literary form and also the notion that a fairytale can only follow one established plot. It gives the reader agency, which a fairytale never does.
Perhaps we should not be sitting here tending the vats and washing the buildings and carrying the money to the vault once a week, like everybody else.
The dwarves begin to doubt the value of their work. They question the repetitive nature of it, and this theme begins to grow stronger as the novel goes on. They do not know why they do what they do, only that they must become more productive and make more money. They also acknowledge that they do this work partially because everyone else does it and reveal that they have no individuality within their status as workers. Barthelme frames the worker as someone who is mindless and doesn't understand his own decisions, obsessing over money and pursuing wealth even to the point of murder.
"The horsewife! The very backbone of the American plethora! The horsewife! Without whom the entire structure of civilian life would crumble!"
Edward's statement reveals the power of the housewife as well as the irony of the dwarves' relationship with Snow White. It also exposes the huge burden borne by housewives and women in general; without the housewife, society would crumble. And yet, housewives have no rights. They spend their days cleaning, like Snow White, who is confined to the apartment and relegated to her chores. Edward and the dwarves acknowledge the value of the housewife but continue to ignore her intellectual capacities, rejecting her writing when she tries to explain a poem she wrote to the dwarves.
"Paul? Is there a Paul, or have I only projected him in the shape of my longing, boredom, ennui and pain? Have I been trained in the finest graces and arts all my life for nothing but this?"
Snow White questions her role as a woman and as a princess within the fairytale. She doubts the existence of a prince—Paul—and even questions whether a princess like her is attracted to the prince or only to the idea of a prince that she must love because of the confines of the fairytale's traditional narrative. She also questions why, despite her education, she must remain defined by her role as a woman in love with a man, rather than a woman with intellectual capacity and the power to make decisions. The lack of agency that women have is emphasized, as well as the confining nature of fairytales, where a princess must always fall in love with the prince.
"Vatricide. That crime of crimes."
During the trial, Bill is accused and hanged for "vatricide"—not tending the vats enough and not living up to his potential as a worker. The dwarves commit murder and kill one of their own because he ceases to be a part of their repetitive work and obsession with increasing their productivity. Barthelme creates a dark parody of people's devotion to empty work (the tending of vats, the washing of buildings, endless and infinite tasks that the dwarves do). They are willing to resort to drastic, extreme measures in order to preserve the banal activities they engage in. Because it is unclear which of the dwarves make this statement, it appears as a generalized statement that all of the dwarves endorse, creating a sense of the collective against a single individual. The dwarves become a tyrannical group and Bill cannot refute them. Their dedication to their work turns them into despots. The novel illuminates the ways in which work and the desire for money can pervert people's morals.
“But who am I to love?” Snow White asked hesitating, because she already loved us, in a way, but it wasn’t enough.
This quote is fundamental for two reasons. First, it is one of the first instances where Snow White begins to question her dictated fairytale role. Princesses know who they love: the prince. But Snow White does not know—she is not the flat archetype of a princess, but an active character with her own psychology and power of decision. Additionally, this quote reveals the dual and unconventional nature of the narrator. The narrator somehow knows what Snow White is saying and thinking when she is alone, even though it is a first-person plural narrator, "us," referring to the dwarves. It subverts the traditional role of a first-person narrator, who typically only inhabits the psychology of one character. Instead, Barthelme disrupts this convention and blurs the distinction between these two narrative techniques.
“You are a slime sir, looking through that open window at that apparently naked girl there, the most beautiful and attractive I have ever seen, in all my life. You are a dishonor to the robes you wear.”
This quote exemplifies a part of Snow White's critique of religion and the Catholic Church. The robes Hogo de Bergerac references are Paul's monk robes, since he became a monk and a part of an abbey after running away from his duty as a prince and away from Snow White. When he returns from the monastery, he returns to his attraction to Snow White and gazes at her as she stands naked in the window. He is going against the Church's vows of celibacy and the monk's duty to be pure and not sexual. The novel implies that Catholic monks do not follow the rules of their position and violate the sanctity that they are obliged to embody and live by. The Church is exposed as hypocritical with corrupt monks like Paul. There is also irony within this statement, since it is Hogo—the "loathsome," sinful character who disregards morality—that criticizes Paul's actions. Paul's actions are so drastically immoral that even Hogo, who has hardly any morals, can recognize their atrocity.
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SNOW WHITE:
IN THE AREA OF FEARS, SHE FEARS
MIRRORS
APPLES
POISONED COMBS
The bolded, capitalized sections like this one relate mantras or lists that cover a range of topics. In this one, the novel references the original Snow White fairytale and the objects that are at the center of the Brothers Grimm's version of the story: the mirror that the Evil Queen speaks to and consults with, the poison apple that Snow White bites, and the poison comb that the Evil Queen tries to use to kill Snow White (she succeeds, but Snow White is then revived by the dwarves in the original tale). But in Barthelme's retelling, Snow White is given an interior psychology, unlike the traditional flat fairytale princess archetype. She also already knows the objects that she must fear, even before seeing them or encountering them in the story. This section implies that Snow White knows her own story, even before it has happened. She is a self-aware fairytale princess. Barthelme's Snow White is conscious and therefore later able to choose where and when she conforms to her original story, regaining her agency as a character outside of a set narrative.
"The 'sludge' quality is the heaviness that this 'stuff' has, similar to the heavier motor oils, a kind of downward pull but still fluid, if you follow me, and I can't help thinking that this downwardness is valuable, although it's hard to say just how, right at the moment."
This quote is part of a larger passage in which Dan explains one of his theories about language. The novel has several passages in which the dwarves begin to discuss abstract concepts and philosophy, however, like this passage, they are often so rooted in abstraction that they become nonsensical. Dan begins using so many substitutional words to outline his theory that it becomes impossible to understand. Sludge, stuff, heaviness, a "downward pull but still fluid"—all of these words are not words he defines. His philosophizing becomes a parody of serious intellectual conversation, totally incomprehensible. It's a satire of intellectual conversation and reveals the emptiness that many intellectual conversations can have.
