Giles Goat-Boy

Giles Goat-Boy is a typical postmodernist fiction of the important American postmodernist writer, John Barth. The present thesis attempts to offer a detailed and systematic analysis of parody as a literary technique used in the setting and story of Giles Goat-Boy (1966). The thesis is divided into three chapters as follows: John Barth and postmodernist fiction, history as setting and the hero myth as story.In the first chapter, emphasis is on the relations of Giles Goat-Boy and postmodernist fiction, especially parody as a typical literary technique in postmodernist fiction.In the second chapter, the setting of American history in the late 1950s and the early 1960s is analyzed. The parodic historical allegory is dealt with in three separate parts. The first considers the superficial equivalences between the University and universe. The second deals more deeply with Barth's re-creation of the American past in the figure of Peter Green; and the third provides an analysis of the dynamic aspect of the novel's historical setting which reflects George's philosophical misadventure, i.e., Lucius Rexford and the Boundary Dispute.In the last chapter of my thesis, elaboration is on the story of this novel, which can be said a hero myth. The hero, George Giles, the goat-boy, is a legendary figure who ascends from the animal to the human, and hence to the heroic. The parody of the hero myth in the work is analyzed from the cycle of the life of George Giles, which is from the departure, initiation, to return, decline and death.