John Barth is a celebrated twentieth century American metafictionalist. He is also an undeniable postmodernist of America. He is rightly termed as absurdist, black humorist, and fabulator. His literary works each of which turned out to be a magnum opus is structurally superb, technically excellent and strong and contextually relevant and significant. John Barth along with his contemporary writers Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr, heralded a new literary movement in America called postmodernism. His oeuvre lends themselves to a postmodernist critical analysis. Barth’s prominent literary works such as The Floating Opera, The End of the Road and Lost in the Funhouse discussed in this book, prove that Barth’s fictions promote multivalence. They are classified as idiolects. They are governed by moral-sense – arete. They bring into being, significant revision of ideas, theories and literary history. Yet again, there is the Apollonian and the Dionysian elements. As a postmodernist works, these fictions of Barth evoke double divinities such as continuity and discontinuity, sameness and difference, unity and rupture, filiation and revolt. These constitute the characteristic elements of John Barth’s fictions. Certainly this book is a pioneer work in the field of American postmodernism focusing John Barth.
