Donald Barthelme's Snow White, published in 1967, is a postmodernist retelling of the Snow White fairytale. Snow White and the seven dwarves—Bill, Kevin, Edward, Hubert, Henry, Clem, and Dan—share an apartment and the novel loosely focuses on the dwarves' individual relationships with Snow White as well as their mission to depose Bill, who is their leader.
Snow White parodies the original fairytale as the characters refuse to adhere to their traditional roles and plot lines. It weaves together a "collage" of styles across three parts, written in small sections that are often one to two pages long. At times, the novel is interrupted by mantras or phrases that take up a single page or other unconventional formal elements, such as a quiz at the end of Part I that explicitly asks the reader to assess the novel so far. The novel incorporates elements of surrealism and absurdity. The characters' actions switch or morph at random, without explanation, and physical objects appear in the novel only to disappear or remain unexplained. The novel defies categorization and it is often difficult to extrapolate a single meaning from it due to the overwhelming number of different styles that it encompasses. Although Snow White appears at times to be nonsensical, it also incorporates criticisms of religion, American culture and society, sexuality, and literary tradition.
Snow White was Barthelme's first published novel. Prior to Snow White, Barthelme had published dozens of short stories and had been featured in the New Yorker many times. Snow White is classified as a "postmodern" novel for its unconventional style, which brings together a "collage" of characters, plot lines, and styles, and due to Barthelme's own close relationship to other postmodernist writers of the time. Barthelme defended and communicated with a class of writers that have now become synonymous with the American postmodern movement, including John Barth, John Hawkes, William Gass, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon. He also admired Italo Calvino, a contemporaneous Italian writer, and Thomas Bernhard, an Austrian postmodernist.
Snow White has partially faded out of the contemporary canon of postmodernists, garnering a cult following but rarely known in the popular consciousness.
