The theme of interior disorder and illness caused by a division between human faculties which naturally complement each other in the act of knowing is, of course, a common one in Western literature; a certain vein of that literature, however, which extends to us from the satires of a Syrian Cynic named Menippus, takes this theme as its primary obsession. Thus we must place Giles Goat-Boy among the works of that vein, including The Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Praise of Folly, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and Tristram Shandy, in order to understand and evaluate it. Giles Goat-Boy is neither novel, tragedy, romance, or epic, nor is it a simple allegory; although it shares much with works in these traditional genres, it remains aloof from all of them, primarily through an extravagant spirit of parody which holds nothing sacred finally except the integrity of its hero's vision, arrived at through an epic glut of experience and ideas ranging across the vast spectrum of possibilities.
An essential characteristic differentiating the Menippean satire from the novel is its attempt to reach the extreme limits of human experience—physical and intellectual, farcical and serious, obscene and sacred, comic and tragic—at the same time…. Menippean satire aims at the tranquil stability in knowledge and experience possessed by "kindergarteners," but it is a stability to be enjoyed only on the far side of the doubts, divisions, conflicts, and dead ends experienced by men fully wise about the world. (pp. 395-96)
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