A Shower of Gold Summary
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“A Shower of Gold,” one of the works from Barthelme’s first collection of short stories, is a meditation on themes developed most fully by the existential philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, whose influence on American thought was especially strong in the 1950’s and 1960’s. The story has more of a plot than do many of Barthelme’s works, and it has a somewhat recognizable situation; its departures from reality are in the twists of situation and in the episodic interruptions by seemingly unconnected characters and plot developments.
The protagonist, a struggling New York artist named Peterson, is trying to get on a television program called Who Am I? The only qualification necessary is that he have strong opinions about some subject—a criticism on Barthelme’s part of the premium that contemporary society placed on novelty over depth, and on the emphasis on the individual implied by making the fact of belief so important. Peterson gets on the show by citing surprising factual data as his opinion, and he is praised by the woman running the program, Miss Arbor, to the extent that he mouths the platitudes of Sartrean philosophy.
Miss Arbor eagerly asks Peterson if he is alienated, absurd, and extraneous: all the depressing things that Sartre held to define humankind’s position in the universe. Nothing is so negative or weighty, Barthelme is saying, that it cannot be turned into glossy ad hype. Peterson resists Miss Arbor’s attempt to pigeonhole him but agrees to go on the show. While waiting to do so, he has run-ins with a number of people: his exploitative manager, who wants him to compromise his artistic integrity by sawing his artworks in half so that they will sell better; his barber, who continues the flow of prepackaged Sartre; the president (whose secret-service agents invade Peterson’s loft and attack him); the player of a “cat-piano” (made by pulling the tails of cats held fast in a frame); and three young women from California who preach a philosophy of “no problem” but exploit his kindness, as do all the others.
Despite these flickering, clearly absurd, and dreamlike happenings, Peterson continues to look for meaning in life. However, he sees the error of his ways when finally he does appear on the show and listens to the monologues of the other contestants. He then begins to free-associate, trailing off in the middle of a fairy-tale version of the tale of Zeus and Danae from which the story’s title is derived and which constitutes Barthelme’s simultaneous evocation of and brushing away of the myth of wholeness that will forever evade Peterson.