Giles Goat-Boy (1966) is the fourth novel by American writer John Barth. It is a metafictional comic novel in which the universe is portrayed as a university campus in an elaborate allegory of both the hero's journey and the Cold War. Its title character is a human boy raised as a goat, who comes to believe he is the Grand Tutor, the predicted Messiah. The book was a surprise bestseller for the previously obscure Barth, and in the 1960s had a cult status. It marks Barth's leap into American postmodern fabulism. Overview Giles Goat-Boy is one of Barth's most complex novels, a multi-layered narrative about the spiritual development of George Giles, goat boy. The book also functions as an allegory of the Cold War. Speaking in 2001, John Barth described the novel this way: Giles Goat-Boy marks Barth's emergence as a metafictional writer. The metafiction manifests itself in the "Publisher's Disclaimer" and "Cover-Letter to the Editors and Publisher" which preface the book, and which each try to pass off the responsibility for authorship onto another: the editors implicate Barth, who claims the text was given to him by a mysterious Giles Stoker or Stoker Giles, who in turn claims it was written by the automatic computer WESCAC. In the disclaimer the "editors" present their opinions on whether or not to publish the book, with responses ranging from repugnance to revelation, and some disparaging both the novel and its presumed author. The "author," JB, having amended the book to an unknown extent, claims it has become accidentally mixed up with a manuscript of his own. The book is further appended with a "Post-Tape" and then a postscript, both potentially spurious, further undermining the authority of the author. {{Quote box|width=30em|"Here fornication, adultery, even rape, yea murder itself (not to mention self-deception, treason, blasphemy, whoredom, duplicity, and willful cruelty to others) are not only represented for our delectation but at times approved of and even recommended! On aesthetic grounds, too (though they pale before the moral), the work is objectionable; the rhetoric is extreme, the conceit and action wildly implausible, the interpretation of history shallow and patently biased, the narrative full of discrepancies and badly paced, at times tedious, more often excessive; the form, like the style, is unorthodox, unsymmetrical, inconsistent"|Anonymous "editor" from Giles Goat Boy'''s preface }}Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt argues that in the novel, “parody and burlesque and tragedy supersede themselves,