One of the most experimental works of John Barth, written in the initial

phase of writing
fiction, Chimera is usually seen as pure metafiction, meaning a “fiction
about postmodernity
writing fiction” or as a work consciously obsessed with its own
realization. As such, this work
thematizes important literary-critical and literary-theoretical questions
and brings them to the center
attention to the nature of fiction and its relationship to reality. Another
crucial theme in Chimera is
even the writing process, which is discussed through numerous
metaphors, storytelling, intertextuality, authorial intrusion, and a variety
of typographic elements, such as
diagrams, diagrams and geometric schemes. At the metafictional level,
the adventures narrated and
the obstacles faced by the protagonists Dunyazade, Scheherazade,
Perseus and Bellerophon become
perfect metaphors for the narrative strategies used by postmodern
authors. For example, each of
the lives of the central characters represent the ambivalent position of a
postmodern author who
he strives to break through his writer's block and produce a memorable
piece of fiction. Into the
in other words, this novel illustrates the postmodern author's mission to
create a successful work that
would be simultaneously a refreshed and revised improvisation of
existing stories and
metafictional discussion about the writing process involved. Therefore,
Barth uses the comments
abundantly on their own narrative strategies and combines these
comments with discussion about
the literary and critical issues of his day. He inventively uses all sorts of
narrative tricks to discover
the fictionality of their own worlds and to convince their readers that
what they read is not a
mirror image of real life. Thus, we can imagine John Barth and his alter
egos (Genie,
Polyiedus), which, like Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy, is above
them
books, real or fictional, and observe the movements of their pencils over
the blank pages. to
At the same time, Barth intentionally raises readers' awareness of the
blurred line between art and
reality by emphasizing the artificiality of its fictional worlds and their
construction through
the medium of language that is not reliable.