Wait a second. Heroes? The Sot-Weed Factor? Epic poetry? Wandering hero figure? Satire? Spoof? Innocence? Experience? That new Susan Faludi book I'm still thinking about reading? Modernism? The modern age?
Maybe what Barth is really satirizing--and maybe what we're more easily going to pick up on now, nearly fifty years after the book was published--is you. You, and your desire for a hero. For something pure, something true, someone honest, someone who can save the day, get the girl, win the game. But then, well: here you go. Here's your hero, in a whorish, fallen age. Your Adam, several thousand years after the Fall, still holding on to the dream. Still denying he ate the apple. A hilarious anachronistic figure. Purity is silly.
And maybe what's funniest about it? Is that you're still going to root for him to win.
(This, by the by, probably makes a lot more sense in my head.)
(Maybe.)
(Only 300 pages to go.)
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