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John Barth's Where 3 Roads Meet: The Limits and Possibilities of Barthian Writing Strategies

Calling into question the world of conventional realist literature, Barth has tried ever-new literary practices throughout his long writing career. This study aims to analyze John Barth's recent postmodern novel, Where 3 Roads Meet, focusing on how the seemingly different 3 pieces of novellas are integrated into a cohesive literary work. In the process, this article probes into Barthian postmodern narrative devices and tries to identify some limits and possibilities of his approach. His earlier short story "Click" showed the challenges posed by new media and effectively presented the ways everyday life approximates hypertextuality. In Where 3 Roads Meet, however, Barth goes back to his old cliché, employing oral storytelling and clinging to self-referentiality. Once experimental and innovative devices have lost their glitters, Barth's tenacious obsession with writer's plight seems overdone in the post-postmodern era. Even his competence as a wordsmith fails to produce humor and witty word plays pleasant enough to match his earlier works. Still, he never gives up his ongoing attempt to create an imaginative work of art, in which we can find a remaining potential of Barth as a virtuoso writer.