Barth's first published work, the existentialist and nihilist story is a first-person account of a day when protagonist Todd Andrews contemplates suicide.

While teaching at Penn State, Barth embarked on a cycle of 100 stories he called Dorchester Tales; he abandoned it halfway through to begin his first two published novels.

[4] The Floating Opera can be viewed with The End of the Road (1958) as forming the early, existentialist or nihilist phase of Barth's writing career.

[10] Barth also sees the book as the second of a "loose trilogy of novels" that concludes with The Sot-Weed Factor, after which he embarked on the fabulist Giles Goat-Boy (1966).

"[12] As The Floating Opera and The End of the Road make little display of the metafictional formal prowess of Barth's later works, critics often overlook them.