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Article: Coover's 'The Babysitter.'
- Article from:
- The Explicator
- Article date:
- September 22, 1995
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1995 Heldref Publications. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Robert Coover's short story "The Babysitter" is not fiction, but fiction(s). Coover presents to the reader all the expository information required of fiction: characters and action. However, it is an impossibility for the reader to organize the action(s) into a cohesive, linear plot; it is also undesirable. "The Babysitter" exploits the art of fiction, the notion of a story, to its full potential, exploding a given situation beyond the limits of linear plot and past the ordinary story-telling conventions of time and space. Coover's tale gives new meaning to reader response, as each permutation and possibility that exists in it is limited only by the imagination of the ...