While Giles Goat-Boy has not maintained the reputation it enjoyed when it was published, it is an important book in Barth's career. It signals his growing interest in the ironic possibilities of myth and demonstrates a further step in his manipulation of structure and narrative techniques as correlatives for his thematic concerns. Giles GoatBoy also encourages the exploration of innocence seen in The Sot-Weed Factor, and the text's political allegory recalls the examination of the origins of American political life in that novel. In addition, the preoccupation with the limits of knowledge is consistent with the thematic concerns of Barth's first two novels.

Barth's later novel LETTERS (1979) returns to a university setting, although it handles that setting in a much less allegorical way than does Giles Goat-Boy. LETTERS, an encyclopedic epistolary novel populated by correspondents from Barth's other works, places Jerome Bray, a descendant of Harold...