The formal ingenuity in The Floating Opera and its mixture of bawdiness, low comedy, and intellectual seriousness are typical of Barth's novels. Although less extravagant than his subsequent fiction, and less involved technically than Lost in the Funhouse (1968), The Floating Opera is essential to an understanding of Barth's development, and it is perhaps the most concise presentation of the ideas that form the dramatic and formal motivation for much of his work. Barth's 1979 novel, LETTERS, returns to the characters in The Floating Opera, and some of the events in the later narrative serve as sequels to episodes that Todd describes in Barth's first published novel.