The Dead Father

First Edition.
“There is nothing unusual about the foot except that it is seven meters high.” Nineteen men are dragging, by means of a cable, an immense carcass through the countryside. The carcass is that of the Dead Father, a half-dead, half-alive, part-mechanical, wise, vain, powerful being who still has hopes for himself, although he is, effectively, dead. “No one can remember when he was not here in our city positioned like a sleeper in troubled sleep, the whole great expanse of him running from the Avenue Pommard to the Boulevard Grist. Working ceaselessly day and night through all the hours for the good of all.”
Thomas, Julie, Edmund, Emma, and the others variously insult, placate, cater to, and defend the Dead Father as the procession moves through the country of the Wends, the territory of the Great Father Serpent, and a variety of encounters and explorations toward its mysterious goal. The Dead Father says: “There were things never knew, what made the pavement gray and what made the giant monuments move back and forth on the far horizon, ceaselessly back and forth on the far horizon, what made the heart stop and how unicorns got trapped in tapes-tries-”
In an austere, extraordinary prose quite unlike anything he has ever done before, Donald Barthelme offers a many-shaded landscape of first and last things, striking, comic, manic, inevitable.