Literature of Exhaustion in John Barth’s Chimera: A Narratological Study

This paper seeks to discern the narratological aspects of John Barth’s famous essay titled “Literature of Exhaustion†in narrative qualities of his own novel, Chimera. Different narrative elements are discussed in the process of reading the essay; they include the death and rebirth of Barth as the author of Chimera, intertextual narrative qualities, hypertextual narrative qualities and the functions of parody and self-reflexivity. Each concept will be discussed in a separate section. The first section aims to discuss the author’s role in the process of narrating the novel to assert his identity and authority in the novel; moreover the author tries to immortalize himself by appearing and disappearing in each part of the novel. The second section focuses on ‘intertextuality’ as one of the major themes of the novel. As Chimera includes the network of textual relations, it is not an independent text and it is a combination of different pre-texts. The third section is going to examine the influence of ‘hypertextuality’ on the novel as it marks the role of pre-existing texts on Chimera. The last section intends to examine the functions of parody and self-reflexivity because the novel undermines the artist’s personal development and the process of narration. The article concludes that parody and self-reflexivity can be regarded as main key terms in John Barth’s narrative techniques. In his Chimera, Barth tries to change the old to the new by various modes of interntextuality, self-reflexivity, and parodic relations such as paradying character’s features to construct and explore a new narrative context.