NIHILISM AND THE TRAGIC VIEW: FORMAL AND THEMATIC UNITY IN THE FICTION OF JOHN BARTH

The fiction of John Barth has consistently exploited the tension between exposing the artifice in narrative strategies of order and asserting literature's mimetic function. Barth's exploration of this antinomy is informed by his early interest in nihilism and his subsequent development of a tragic view of existence; his seven volumes of fiction from The Floating Opera to LETTERS can be read as successive dramatizations of these philosophical premises. From his early interrogation of the realistic tradition to his later elaboration of the roles of artifice and narrative self-consciousness, Barth's fiction has been concerned with the struggle for order and a basis for action in a contingent world. Barth's preoccupation with the absence of any absolute or extra-human principle of order in the world also aligns his work with the conservative fictionalist tradition and places it at the heart of the postmodern sensibility. This thesis shows how Barth's informing philosophical premises unify the formal strategies and thematic concerns in each of his books. It demonstrates that these texts trace a coherent pattern of development in Barth's career, and it establishes the overall significance of his work in the context of contemporary literary culture.