The enchanted storyteller: John Barth and the magic of Scheherazade

Abstract

During the fifties he was considered to be an existentialist, and absurdist and later a Black Humorist, yet, John Barth proved that he would never subscribe to any specific theory and would make his own world of/about fiction by himself. A traditional postmodernist as some of the critics calls him; he was obsessed with Scheherazade the narrator of the Thousand and one Nights and her art of storytelling. This essay aims to depict Barth's employment of the frame narrative and embedding structure which are the main devices of Scheherazade's mystifying narratives. Revealing the architectonic structure of his writing, we would demonstrate how traditional technique can bridge postmodernist aesthetics to recreate and replenish the exhausted materials in writings.