The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor by John Barth

First published: 1991

Type of plot: Metafiction

Time of work: The ninth and twentieth centuries

Locale: Ninth century Baghdad and twentieth century Maryland

Principal Characters:

• Simon Behler, a twentieth century journalist who later becomes Somebody the Sailor
• Bijou, Simon’s twin sister, who died at birth yet lives on in his mind
• Jane Price, Simon’s first wife
• Sindbad the Sailor, the famous maritime hero of the Arabian Nights
• Jayda, Sindbad’s former concubine
• Kuzia Fakan, Sindbad’s current concubine
• Yasmin, Sindbad’s daughter, eventually the wife of Somebody

The Novel

In The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, Scheherazade, the heroine of the medieval Arabic short-story collection The Thousand and One Nights (ca. 900) and her sister Dunyazade have now grown old. Their husbands and even their children have died. They wonder if their fabulous story is finally coming to an end. Meanwhile, at a lavish banquet, the mysterious Somebody the Sailor is telling the people of Baghdad about his many voyages. He is matched in this storytelling feat by Baghdad’s most famous hero, Sindbad the Sailor.

In another dimension, Somebody was once Simon Behler, an American journalist. Simon Behler is a young boy in Maryland in the 1930’s. Simon is a typical young boy with parents, an elder brother, and cousins, but he also had a female twin, Bijou, who died as both of them were coming out of the womb. Simon always feels that he experiences the absent Bijou’s feelings as well as his own. The most memorable adventure of Simon’s boyhood is going up in a small plane with the aviator Howard Garton. Simon sees his entire community from above and begins to perceive it as but one in a number of possible worlds. This adventure has its emotional parallel when Simon is fourteen, when he conducts a passionate affair with Daisy Moore, a slightly older girl with a family history of madness (her mother is periodically hospitalized in an insane asylum). Daisy initiates him sexually with humor and tenderness, and he faces teenage ethical dilemmas such as whether to tell the druggist for whom he works that he stole a can of floor polish from the store in order to help his family. The curtain falls on childhood innocence as Simon’s older brother, Joe Junior, is reported missing while fighting in World War II Sindbad the Sailor is perplexed by the mysterious Somebody, whose modern-day American origins are even more mysterious to him as Sindbad’s mythical Arabic origins are to the modern reader.

Yet Sindbad is a congenial host nevertheless. Somebody becomes immersed in the domestic milieu of Sindbad’s household. He flirts with Sindbad’s daughter, Yasmin, and becomes friendly with his former concubine, Jayda. Jayda has had many experiences since her birth in Cairo, many of them sexual in nature, and Simon finds her as entertaining a storyteller as he is himself. The entire household is entertained by the story of Sindbad’s early voyages. These include stories of flying carpets as well as magical birds such as rocs and distinctly unmagical ones such as vultures, who put Sindbad through a terrible ordeal in which he loses some fingers.

Joe Junior was in fact not killed in the war, and he and his wife accompany the adult Simon and his wife, Jane Price, on a cruise to the British Virgin Islands. Simon (who now spells his last name “Baylor”) has become a successful and famous autobiographical journalist, but he has been unfaithful in his marriage, having had brief affairs with two younger women, Teri from Teaneck and Teresa Aginelli. When Simon’s watch is water-damaged and Jane does not particularly care, Simon realizes that his marriage has stumbled. He goes on shore in order to buy a new watch, only to find he is suddenly in a new dimension, more like an Arab marketplace than anything to be found in the Caribbean. With the help of a kindly Arab merchant, he escapes any danger, but his sense of what is real and what is imaginary is totally muddled.

In Baghdad, Somebody and Yasmin have fallen in love. In order to win Yasmin’s hand, Somebody at first has to accompany Sindbad on his voyages, then has to take his place entirely as the great sailor declines into degeneracy and ill temper.

Divorced from Jane and with his head still filled with Arabian dreams, Simon encounters Julie Moore, Daisy’s younger sister, in Spain. Daisy, like her mother, is now in an insane asylum. Simon falls in love with Julie, and they decide to take a voyage to the Far East together. On the way, though, a storm strikes their ships, and Simon finds himself cast fully into the world of Sindbad, in which he is only “Somebody the Sailor.” Accused by the caliph of Baghdad of financial skullduggery and of mistreating his family, Sindbad is punished and, along with Jayda, exiled. Having proved his mettle, Somebody marries Yasmin. His personal happiness achieved, Simon imaginatively returns to his beginnings, the marshes of Maryland. He realizes that Daisy and Yasmin are both aspects of his lost twin Bijou, his ultimate female complement. Nothing is ever lost, as there are always more tales to be told. Scheherazade need not fear; the circle of storytelling will continue.

The Characters

Simon Behler is at once a realistic protagonist and the fulcrum of Barth’s narrative. Like many a novelistic hero, Simon grows up, develops, and forges his own identity. Yet his experience is not narrowly biographical. It encompasses reams of stories, old and new, stretching in space from his boyhood home to the other side of the world and also back into the mythical recesses of time. Simon loses his identity when he is translated to the Arabian Nights world, becoming only “Somebody.” Yet this loss of his self’s former solidity is an eventual boon for Simon, as he merges with Sindbad, taking advantage of the permeability of character emblematic of fantasies and fairy tales. At the book’s end, Simon is both a better “hero” than Sindbad ever was and also more truly himself than he could ever be in the real world with the narrowly constructed, biographical identity he had there.

Though never a full-fledged character, Bijou radiantly projects the principle of love in the book. As Simon’s lost twin, she is the other side of his self, its complementary pole. His early relationship with Daisy brings him closer to his primal kinship with Bijou, though in adult life he becomes separated from that unity in his loveless marriage to Jane. Julie and Yasmin are two sides of the same character, the realistic and fantastic versions of the woman who at once ends Simon’s voyage and brings him back to its beginnings.

Some of the women characters in the Arab segments do not fully emerge as individuals. Kuzia Fakan, for example, does little more than intrigue and provide sexual pleasure. Yasmin is a more rounded character, though, and Jayda has her own series of stories in which she is the heroine and all the other characters are bit players.

Barth’s interest in storytelling means that he is not as interested in character as more realistic novelists. However, the novel’s characters both move the reader and provide the conceptual framework for the novel’s faith in storytelling.

Critical Contexts

Barth is usually characterized as a metafictionist, an author who writes fiction about fiction and is unapologetic about its fictional nature, not fiction depicting allegedly real persons or events. This is partially true of The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor, yet the many episodes that are conventionally realistic should not be discounted. Simon’s memories of growing up in Maryland are rendered in an affectionately realistic style similar to nonfiction reminiscences such as Sidney Offit’s Memoir of the Bookie’s Son (1995). Simon’s first two “voyages” are as realistic as anything Barth ever wrote, perhaps more realistic than his actual autobiography, Once upon a Time (1994). Barth playfully comments on the impossibility of totally distinguishing fantasy and realism when he depicts the Arabs’ reaction to Somebody’s first two voyages. Ibn al-Hamra objects to Somebody’s second voyage, the Daisy Moore story, by claiming that it forsakes the ground of “traditional realism,” which he then defines as having to do with rocs, genies, and magic carpets. Of course, in Ibn al-Hamra’s world, these things are taken as the norm, whereas such workaday objects as cars and automobiles are so flagrantly eccentric that for him they should not be allowed within the canons of serious literature. Readers may laugh at ibn al-Hamra and complacently conclude that his world is fictional, but the novel then provokes them to wonder whether their own existence is fictional as well. Ibn al-Hamra is the mirror image of a modern reader who might find the story of Simon’s boyhood more “realistic” than Sindbad’s voyages. Realism, Barth implies, is a function of expectations; if readers suspend those expectations, they will see that fantasy is at least as viable a medium for storytelling as the mode termed “realism.” Barth has been accused by critics of being self-indulgent in his flamboyant adventures. His self-conscious retellings of myth are sometimes criticized as evading American realities of the twentieth century, just as Ibn al-Hamra sees Somebody’s outrageous stories as neglecting the thematic realities of fantastic Baghdad. Barth’s juxtaposition of fantasy and realism turns the tables on these critics, revealing them as constrained by expectations that, unlike Somebody’s voyages, are merely of their own time.

Bibliography

Barth, Johm. “Conversation with Prime Maximalist John Barth.” Interview by Bin Ramke and Donald Revell. Bloomsbury Review, 1991. This interview with Barth reveals some of the autobiographical bases of the novel’s narrative.

Bowen, Zack R. A Reader’s Guide to John Barth. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. An accessibly written general overview; concentrates on the inverse relationship between Sindbad and Simon/Somebody.

Kirk, James. Organicism as Reenchantment: Whitehead, Prigogine, and Barth. New York: Peter Lang, 1993. Comments on Barth’s mystique of storytelling as well as its formal relation to modern science.

Lindsay, Alan. Death in the Funhouse: John Barth and Poststructuralist Aesthetics. New York: Peter Lang, 1995. Sometimes complicated but rewarding insights on the complexity of Barth’s vision.

Tobin, Patricia. John Barth and the Anxiety of Continuance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Emphasizes the affirmative quality of the novel, seeing the modern-day Simon as replenishing the legend of the storied Sinbad.