"...the self-questioning voice that, teasing at the very role of author, was to become an unmistakable literary trademark in his subsequent fictions" (Ziegler 12)

In his first two novels B directs his attention mainly to the ideas of Nihilism and Existentialism, and he describes through the protagonists Todd and Jacob that no pretensions or false roles can provide an escape from the fundamental meaninglessness of existence. Solely the work of art can perhaps posit meaning. ...(Glaser-W 207)

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Whereas in LF the character of the fledgling artist, Ambrose Mensch, had to give way to characters who, like Menelaus, are not artists, but become their own stories, in Ch Barth manages to reintegrate the person of the artist into the mainstream if not of life, then at least of literature, by having himself as an author meeting Scheherazade in the "Dunyazadiad" in a timeless realm of story telling.(Ziegler 14) 

The story "Echo"...appears asthe central tale of LF and is the turning-point of Barth's fiction., Up to this point the author had implicitly described his development and gradual transformation into an artist. Now the introduction of the character of Author with a capital A, whose role resembles that of the nymph Echo, left Barth himself free to return to life. 

In LF and Ch the author shows his profound interest in the role of the artist and the process of artistic creation. Therefore these works exemplify quite clearly the novelist's aesthetics and they prove that Barth enjoys literary experiments.  .(Glaser-W 211)

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"To the extent that [my novels] are novels of ideas--and that's a very limited extent--they are that because they dramatize alternatives to philosophical positions" (Alan Prince, "Interview"). 

It should be emphasized here, however, that The End of the Road is Barth's only primary novel of ideas. The rest are similar to it inasmuch as parts of the action are based on philosophical debate.... [But they are more than that] 

Rather than dramatizing the madness of contemporary society as the Black Humorists, Barth's aim has always been to "dramatize alternatives to philosophical positions," to imagine people with opposing philosophies and then to join them in battle. (Morrell 97-8)
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"To the extent that the term includes some kind of philosophical attitude that's one brand or another of nihilism, this is, in my case, truer of the earlier books which were, however, done in a manner of conventional realism, than of the later ones where it seems to me the nihilism is not too important in the story." (Morrell 98-9)

Existentialist Novel

The world of the existentialist novel, says Ihab Hassan, is largely devoid of "presuppositions" about "values, traditions, or beliefs." Thus, whatever values man creates, he does so in isolation, and starting from scratch."  (Noland 15-)

The existential novel, says Hassan, is neither "wholly tragic nor truly comic." It cannot achieve the finality and awareness of these forms because there is no finality or awareness in the world it records. ...The existential novelist, therefore, must present this world in a form which contains an awareness of relativity, a form which includes both terror and laughter. Such a form, Hassan observess, is typically ironic, which allows "the recognition not only of irreconcilible conflicts but actually of absurdity." (Noland 20)

What little movement there has been in my own philosophical premises or stances in the last 25 years, has been from that kind of naive Nihilism, Absurdism, to a perhaps equally naive, but nevertheless heartfelt Tragic View of Life, ...that is that there are finally just diffirent ways to live, but these differences are very important." (Glaser-W 5)

Angst, a feeling which originates from his total solitude when having to face nothingness. Whereas this existential Angst leads to despair in Nihilism, it is regarded in Existentialism as a means to reveal to the human the essence of being, identity, and freedom. In order to discover these phenomena, man must consciously take upon himself this existential Angst. 

With the 1967 publication of The Fabulators by Robert Scholes, that focus [on themes] began to shift. British and American writers such as Barth, Scholes maintained, takes an especial delight in formal design for its own sake, an observation that almost singlehandedly redirected critical attention away from them[e] toward B's formal inventiveness. (Harris 4)

As Scholes explains the word, it signifies a narrative in which the author has had great joy arranging words, designing structures, developing ideas. Whether the ideas are optimistic, pessimistic, or whatever, makes no difference; the joy in developing them, a joy that very often displays itself as humor, is the same. (Morrel 99)

e.g. Floating Opera its complex form of interflowing subplots.

[the narrator's] love of implication, language, and design

The End of the Road not a full-blown fabulation because of its lack of elaborate design, it is almost one... Regardless of the [fabulative principles articulated by Horner], ER is more like a novel of ideas than a fabulation. 

[The others] have that extravagant artifice which The Road does not have and which makes the rest fabulations (Morrell 99-). 

structure
 

The elaborate structures of Barth's fiction (except ER) tend to have an importance of their own also. 

FO--the interflow of plot is an image of the way life works

SW--the enormous plot complications that are tied neatly at the end are a representation of the distortion we normally mkae out of life...

GGB--wheels within wheels

LF--echoes

The balance and order of these extravagant designs are soothing and resolving; they give a feeling of wholeness, a feeling that one is certain came to the man who arranged them, both the writers within the fictions and the writer of the fictions.

That is what fabulation is all about: a delight in putting together and balancing and implicating and designing. The process is at heart a rejection of life and the world in favor of the life and world of art...and the process is demontrated in the mov. of B's fiction away from the real world of FO and ER, through the fantastic world of SW and GGB to the universe of language in LF...

a dead end to abstract language. (ER--a dead end of realism)

a new direction--away from pessimism toward a full-hearted embracement of life, esp. love, and a reliance on writing not as an anodyne to painful living but as a metaphor the truth of which is taht the joy one can take in words is the same as the joy one can take in everything.  (Morrell 113)

Early they are enamored of the world, happy, carefree, curious [e.g. Todd, Eben, the sperm]

But then something horrid destroys their joyful innocence--they let their curiosity get the better of them, they start thinking about things too much, and before long they are mixed up in such dizzying complexity that they come near to falling into what ...Ebenezer Cooke calls the pit.

Todd--broods about his heart disease until he decides to kill himself.

Jake--about the lack of reasons for action--paralyzed

Eben--about the too-many reasons for action--paralyzed

Giles--about the meaning of life until he twice destroys the university with his counsel, is constricted by paradox and his mind almost cracked

the sperm--about the meaning of his journey  (Morrell 101-)

So when B's protagonists examine their lives and their world until everything becomes intolerably complex and overpowering, they escape by shifting their characters and distorting their situation, by putting on masks to face what they are up against.

The trouble is that the protagonists are not always able to come up with viable roles to play...--crisis

Horner--keeps in motion by practicing a variety of roles...then he nearly immobilizes himself because, as the Doctor points out, he gives himself the "wrong part" to play, that of penitent instead of villain....[his new role] autobiographer.

Eben--adheres too much to his role of moral innocent, and the crisis comes when he realizes how much harm he has done himself and others by persisting in that role.---the role of penitent. 

Storytells in LF--the crisis in their lives a continuing one--what and how to keep writing--since to stop would mean getting lost, pining away, or killing themselves in the funhouse of the world.

Their Cosmophilism is at one end of a spectrum, the opposite of which is Cosmopsis; both are based on a knowledge of the world's complexity, but mobility is the nature of the first and paralysis of the second...In between, each protagonist vacillates, now paralyzed, now relatively fluid.

Barth's first two protagonists, terrified by the unity they glimpse, retreat behind a shield of words.

SW--Henry Burlingame deliberately seeks cosmic harmony,

GGB--George, transcending categories, achieves it.

The problem of the mythopoeic writer is how to translate mythic intimations, which are finally ineffable, into words capable of evoking that which may not be articulated. Barth's next two books, LF and Ch, address this difficulty, the former focusing primarily on the relationship between sex, language, and myth; the latter, by far the most "socially conscious" of Barth's first six books, showing how myth may inform life as well as art.
(Harris 7)