John Barth's Giles goat-boy : a study

1980

This study seeks to rectify some of the prevailing misconceptions about the nature of John Barth' s fiction by offering a comprehensive analysis of his fourth novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966). The study delineates two dialectics that together create the paradoxical tensions of Barth's work. The first operates between metaphor, which seeks and affirms patterns in language, and irony, which invokes metaphor in order to deny its validity; the second operates within metaphor, between metafiction, which self-reflexively examines language and fiction, and metaphysics, which focuses attention on man and his universe. Contrary to established critical opinion on Barth, which tends to stress the role pla…