The theme of interior disorder and illness caused by a division between human faculties which naturally complement each other in the act of knowing is, of course, a common one in Western literature; a certain vein of that literature, however, which extends to us from the satires of a Syrian Cynic named Menippus, takes this theme as its primary obsession. Thus we must place Giles Goat-Boy among the works of that vein, including The Satyricon, Gargantua and Pantagruel, The Praise of Folly, Don Quixote, Gulliver's Travels, and Tristram Shandy, in order to understand and evaluate it. Giles Goat-Boy is neither novel, tragedy, romance, or epic, nor is it a simple allegory; although it shares much with works in these traditional genres, it remains aloof from all of them, primarily through an extravagant spirit of parody which holds nothing sacred finally except the integrity of its hero's vision, arrived...