Toward the beginning of his confession, the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground writes, "I am firmly convinced not only that a great deal of consciousness, but that any consciousness is a disease." John Barth, among other recent writers who deal with the theme of identity in the tradition of Dostoevsky, takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource—namely, the subject of his fiction. Then, he forces the reader to experience self-consciousness by making him as aware of his role as reader as Barth is of his role as writer. The reader engages in a dialogue with a series of narrators, with reader and narrator consciously dependent upon one another. In challenging himself to sport with, to create a "game" out of this situation, Barth on the one hand educates his reader to confront the problem of self-consciousness, at...