Minimalist Fiction (John Barth Quote)

It's interesting and informative to consider the various ways fiction can be viewed as minimalist that goes far beyond mere story length. 

 Snip from A Few Words About Minimalism by John Barth:

"Old or new, fiction can be minimalist in any or all of several ways. There are minimalisms of unit, form and scale: short words, short sentences and paragraphs, super-short stories, those three-eighth-inch thin novels aforementioned, and even minimal bibliographies (Borges' fiction adds up to a few modest, though powerfully influential, short-story collections). There are minimalisms of style: a stripped-down vocabulary; a stripped-down syntax that avoids periodic sentences, serial predications and complex subordinating constructions; a stripped-down rhetoric that may eschew figurative language altogether; a stripped-down, non-emotive tone. And there are minimalisms of material: minimal characters, minimal exposition ("all that David Copperfield kind of crap," says J.D. Salinger's catcher in the rye), minimal mises en scene, minimal action, minimal plot."