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Abstract
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In The Friday Book Barth describes himself as “an arranger still” at heart whose main literary pleasure is “to take a received melody – an old narrative poem, a classical myth, a shopworn literary convention, a share of my experience … [and] reorchestrate it to the present purpose”. The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor (1991) is the tale of marvelous explorations and forays into the magical world of myths and ancient tales. He takes the received melody of Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights and adventures of Sindbad. What Barth does in this novel is displaying the loneliness of man and the impossibility and absurdity of any attempt to construct a notion of one’s self and the crisis of self that arises. A formidable sense of loss and a vague yet omnipresent obsession with death and immortality prevail in the entire novel. It is through the choice of his subject matter, the multiplicity of narrative voices and tampering with the concept of the double, intertextuality and metafiction and also the recurrent crossing of almost all boundaries that Barth maintains such fluid and noticeable sense of loss and idea of death yet with such an appealing coating of playfulness and light-heartedness. The purpose of this article is to clarify how these elements contribute to maintain the chief intention of the novel, that is, the ultimate sense of loss and the impending doom that heralds the end. Thus, reversing and recreating the original patterns of Sindbad’s marvelous adventures, Barth depicts the inevitability of man’s failure to find, construct and maintain some form of identity as well as a profound alienation that cannot be eschewed even when one crosses the boundaries of time and place. Barth deliberately violates the narrative techniques and thus portrays the incapability of art in being a remedy for such alienation.
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