The Staleness of Conventional Writing

The entire book is an examination of the established ways of writing fiction that had become boring and repetitive to John Barth by the 1960s. He concluded nothing new was being written and authors simply wrote automatically to a formula that had been established for a century, at least. Barth consistently pokes fun at this fact and puts his own twists on traditional writing techniques in order to prove his point. Many times he addresses the reader directly and points out how he or she must be getting frustrated since the stories in the book appear to be going nowhere. Several pages into the piece and long before the Mensch family arrives at Ocean City, Barth pauses in the action to say “a long time has gone by already without anything happening; it makes a person wonder. We haven’t even reached Ocean City...