[The] fiction of Robert Coover is tightly unified by its metafictional impulses. In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, nearly all of Coover's works deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature…. Yet Coover's work is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems—such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics—are also fictional at their core. Indeed, in most of Coover's fiction there exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. For Coover, this tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them.
In developing this view of man-as-fiction-maker, Coover is hoping to illuminate not only the process through which narrative art is created but also the broad base of metaphor through which the universe is comprehended. His application points in the same direction as the study of the use of metaphor in so many other areas of investigation, such as anthropology, mathematics, linguistic analysis, the various metasciences, and so on. Each of these disciplines has tended to analyze its own structures as useful models or symbolic systems created by man—either consciously or through some sort of innate structuring agency within him—and then applied to the world. In his fascinating study, The Myth of Metaphor, Colin Turbayne has examined Descartes's mind-body dualism and Newton's universe-as-machine analogy as examples of the way in which metaphors gradually instill themselves as ontological verities. The process Turbayne describes for "undressing" such hidden metaphors is very similar to what Coover is aiming for in his fiction:
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