If you are a novelist of a certain type of temperament, then what you really want to do is re-invent the world. God wasn't too bad a novelist, except he was a Realist.

In that period he came to know "the remarkable short fiction" of the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges which inspired his collection Lost in the Funhouse. Barth has since insisted that he was merely making clear that a particular stage in history was passing and pointing to possible directions from there.