[3] 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.

[4] 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.

[6] "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" Bookworm host Michael Silverblatt argues that in the novel, “parody and burlesque and tragedy supersede themselves, transcend themselves.”[2] Much of the humor and many events in the book employ a number of potentially offensive representations of blacks, Jews and women, and historical events such as the Holocaust are the subjects of absurdist humor.

"[9] George Giles is a boy raised as a goat who rises in life to be Grand Tutor (spiritual leader or messiah) of New Tammany College (the United States, or the Earth, or the Universe).

[12] Rather than discovering his true identity, George ultimately chooses it, much like Ebeneezer Cooke does in Barth's previous novel, The Sotweed Factor.

Thus, for example, the founder of a religion or great religious leader becomes a Grand Tutor (in German Grosslehrer), and Barth renames specific leaders as well: Jesus Christ becomes Enos Enoch (meaning in Hebrew "The man who walked with God" or "humanity when it walked with God"[14]), Moses becomes Moishe, Buddha becomes the original Sakhyan.

[18] The novel also contains a forty-page parody in small type of the full text of Oedipus Rex called Taliped Decanus.

[22] Giles Goat-Boy was released the same year as a number of landmark works in the early history of postmodern American literature, most notably Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49.

"[27] However, by 1984, Robert Alter referred to the book as "reced[ing] into the detritus of failed experiments in American fiction", calling it "little more than an inflated translation game ... so brittle a cleverness that it constantly reveals the tediousness of the novel's informing conception.

[22] Barth's own statements on the primacy of aesthetics in his writing have tended to obscure the book's otherwise obvious politics, particularly the 1960s Cold War allegory.

[35] Barth has come to see Giles Goat-Boy as "the first American postmodernist novel,"[36] an assertion picked up by many of his critics and biographers, but not universally accepted.

[37] The novel was the central exhibit of Robert Scholes' The Fabulators (1967), a study of a tendency in contemporary writers to eschew realism in fiction.