In the following essay, Bradbury discusses the fiction of John Barth, finding that the author uses self-reflexive techniques to comment on American culture.

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 eac...

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, Gulliv...

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...

With Sabbatical John Barth confirms that he has joined the ranks of the Old Poops. A useful category this, invented by Kurt Vonnegut for purposes of self-description. OPs are writers who once upon a time were prodigally talented, funny and full of bright and savage ideas, but have now "mellowed" into premature anecdotage; cuddly, avuncular, sermonizing old buffers, whose main text is how, once upon a time … etc, since of course OPs are nothing if not self-aware. Self-awareness was one o...

[Barth's aesthetic] embodies a conscious attempt to go beyond Joyce—by going backwards. Like the protagonist of his "Perseid," who must return to Joppa, the scene of his youthful heroics, if he is to go forward with his life, Barth roots his strategy in the Shakespearean realization that fiction is "a kind of true representation of the distortion we all make of life." It is crucial, he feels, to attempt to deal with the discrepancy between art and Reality, and he fi...

[Barth's] awareness of the right word and manipulations of "voice" are brilliant and sometimes devastating. Barth's wit—his word-play, his verbal parody, his subtle ridicule of everything pretentious, banal, ignorant, pedestrian—is clearly inseparable from his basic fictional impulses. The word "flabbergasting" is appropriate to Barth himself as fiction writer, but it is not appropriate to me as fiction writer. On the other hand, my own heavier cadence...

In the no man's land of contemporary fiction, Barth has always been a willing occupier of the trenches, a writer concerned both to advance and defend, and this posture has given us works both of great interest and unevenness. His newest, Sabbatical, continues the pattern of engagement and stands as a worthy effort, if a flawed one. As with the earlier novels so with this one: the false starts and rough edges in Sabbatical derive not at all from a lack of skill but rather from the difficulties inheren...

Whether or not we are ever so rewarded, most of us believe we deserve a sabbatical, a time outside the scheme of our lives to rest and ruminate, to reckon how far we have come and, if we're lucky, to recognize where we must go. That's the theory, John (Simmons) Barth 1930– © Helen Marcus 1981anyway. It is also the earnest hope of Fenwick Scott Key Turner, 50, and Susan Rachel Allan Seckler, 35, in their seventh ye...

[In Letters, the] subplots, counterplots, and crossplots … exfoliate maddeningly and impinge even more maddeningly upon one another. Its language ranges from the disconcertingly flat and factual to the disconcertingly baroque, from drab to lunatic-ornate. And when it is not tracing insane patterns of coincidence and repetition—patterns almost as insane, indeed, as those of "real life"—the story is variously lubricous, violent, and macabre: rape, murder, suicide, arson, pil...

Much of John Barth's fiction arises out of his scrupulous, exacting, sometimes excruciating, consideration of his own position as a Novelist writing Now. The state of fiction is as much on his mind, if not more, than the state of America or the world; indeed he would probably argue that to be deeply concerned with the former is only another way of being deeply concerned about the latter. (p. 1) As he writes in Letters: "I am by temperament a fabricator, not a drawer-from-life." This, of...

The sequence in [Lost in the Funhouse] leads us from the meditations of a sperm through the boyhood adventures of Ambrose to the mythical life history of an anonymous Homeric bard marooned on a desert island and forced to create a life-work out of his own life. From infancy through childhood, and then to the province of the mythical, Barth seems intent on writing large that wonderful sentence of Joyce's, "God becomes man becomes fish becomes barnacle goose becomes featherbed mountain." ...

After the slow-grinding, interlocking minutiae of Letters, John Barth may have thought that his readers deserved a breather, and he's given them one: Sabbatical. Set largely on a sailboat nosing along the chops of the Chesapeake Bay, Sabbatical is a chummily facetious scribble about a former CIA officer and his sweetie and all the weird, wacky things that happen to them "twixt stern and starboard." Like other Barth novels, this one ladles on the Maryland lore: the tweeting couple is nam...

"We'll have to stick to the channel," John Barth wrote in his first novel, "The Floating Opera," and let the creeks and coves go by." His new work ["Sabbatical"] explores all the creeks and coves it can, both literally and figuratively. It drifts with what one of its characters calls the narrative tide, it goes back, goes forward, stands still. It begins with a storm at sea, describes an uncanny island not to be found on any chart and records the surfa...

[The author of Letters manages] to keep a sober promise he makes early on, namely that "the several narratives will become one." He brings it off by framing the individual narratives in a film production, an attempt by a moviemaker to create a screen version not of one of his books but of all of them, including those still unwritten. (p. 91) Midway in Letters, Barth reproduces a patch of his own correspondence in which he asserts that the book "will not be obscure, difficult, or dense i...

'There was a story that began—' begins Sabbatical, and the story is then interrupted for two nights and a day by a storm at sea, itself interrupted by a dialogue on Aristotle's distinction between lexis and melos. Like most Post-Modernist fantasies, Sabbatical takes a lot of unpacking. But this is John Barth in a holiday mood, and a virtuoso display of techniques brought together from different kinds of novel is here frankly offered for enjoyment. One of its methods is purely rea...

John Barth has seen art as the world "elsewhere," the better world where nothing disappears. Letters is his billet doux to literature and his plea to his own creations to return the gift of life…. Barth attempts a kind of self-renewal through retrieving and repossessing his fictional offspring and his youth as a writer. Wading through the plots and people of his past novels, Barth seems to search for some fresh emotion. Although he fails to find it, his search is itself a wily and power...

[John Barth's] first novel since Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is, as publishers like to say, an event. Letters … is a big event, almost half a million words, 864 pages, seven years in its making…. Be forewarned, then: Here is yet another fiction whose principal purpose is to regard itself, to finger (seldom lovingly, often contemptuously) its own artifices, to play the venerable modernist game of Seems and Is. In keeping with his preoccupation with what he has called "exhausted" ...

In a novel [Letters] that takes many risks, the identity of the correspondents is the biggest risk of all. They are all figures from Barth's previous fiction…. [Even] though the letters generate their own energy and the correspondents develop their own lives, the choice of the correspondents still retains a coterie effect…. The device does, to be sure, expand two conceits which, now and then, enter the minds of all readers of fiction. The first is that playful act in which one rearrange...

Asked by the editors of the New York Times Book Review … to explain how he became a writer, John Barth gave a surprising answer. "It is my fate and equally my sister's to have been born opposite-sex twins, between whom everything went without saying." But "after circumstances and physical maturation" separated him from his sister, Barth was forced to sail belatedly into society on the changeable winds of language, "talking to the Others, talking to oneself.&#...