It is striking … to see how much Barth's fiction has been moving toward the fulfillment of an idea—the idea being the repudiation of narrative art…. That is the paradox of Barth's novels: they are about paralysis, they seem even to affirm paralysis, yet they have more narrative energy than they know what to do with. (pp. 95-6)
Each [of Barth's four first novels] is generally longer, wilder, more ambitious, more outrageous than its predecessor, and at the core of each is a greater nihilism…. Nihilism is merely a quirk of character in The Floating Opera and End of the Road; it is not much more than a setting for comedy, a device for irony. But nihilism is what The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy come to. It is the moral, meaning, and upshot of experience in these novels, and it is embedded in their very form. The Sot-Weed Factor, disguised as an eighteenth-century novel, is really a radical definition of the novel of the twentieth century. Giles Goat-Boy, disguised as cosmic allegory, keeps undercutting its own allegorical premises by denying the possibility of meaning, identity, and answers in a world in which these things are always shifting, masked, and unattainable. The deeper nihilism of [these] … novels comes from their proclaiming not so much the impossibility of life but the impossibility of narrative.
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