Examine the use of irony in The Floating Opera giving suitable examples from the novel.

By pushing the novel’s “harmony of parts” in to the realm of farcical exaggeration, Barth suggests disorder by inversion. Moreover, since the novel’s theme clearly concerns absurdity, an incongruity exists between the novel’s form and its philosophy. Like the ironic structure, however this incongruity becomes functional, serving to reflect that incongruity which is a part of an absurd universe.

Most of the experimental novels, besides those of Barth, of Heller, and Vonnegut offer a critical and creative parody of one literary form or the other. Irony becomes the literary mode itself, not the part of a comic or tragic denoument.