John Barth

Abstract

What makes Barth a central figure of the postmodernist literary movement, then, is this transmutation of exhausted literary genres into a sequence of so many fictionalized existential experiences which, like life itself as long as it lasts, can never be exhausted. In regarding the relationship between literary modernism and postmodernism as one of paternal lineage, Barth's literary development brings postmodernist fiction to life. The fact that Barth has chosen parody as his favored mode of writing signifies that he accepts his literary predecessors as models and yet rejects their fictions as artifacts. Parody for him mirrors the father/son conflict. Barth is more important in the sense that no other postmodernist writer has internalized the conflict between tradition and the self to the same degree. This conflict informs his whole life - the real as well as the literary.