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In his pilgrimage through the metamorphic landscape, Goat-Boy re-enacts some of the known episodes of the life of Christ. He confounds philosophers, has disciples and enemies, is tempted by power and false worship. At one stage, he denies (or asserts) himself: "I'm no Enoch Enoch [God]. I've got as much Billygoat as Graduate [Christ]. And as much as the Dean o' Flunks [the devil] or anyone else." While Barth seems to be crudely baiting religion, he is actually enunciating his concern with the theological conception of the hypostatic nature of Christ—that Christ was both fully human and fully divine. Goat-Boy's Vergil on his pilgrimage is Stoker, a cynical beast of burden who may be in league with the devil and whose slogan is: "Never mind the question! The answer's Power."
Finally, Goat-Boy is arrested and turned over to a lynch mob. His last message is, "To Pass All, Fail All"—A twist on the Biblical text, "He who loses his life shall preserve it." On the gallows, rope around his neck, Goat-Boy gets a reprieve. Then he disappears. He is 33—Christ's age at death.
He leaves a final obfuscation in a codicil modeled on the apocryphal Book of Revelation. Goat-Boy ascends a hill beyond Founder's Rock and, in an exploit of mystical sex, with his male parts wreathed in mistletoe, splits the rock and sounds a new and enigmatic dispensation. In this veiled and quite possibly diabolic climax, Barth offers one glint of hope. Goat-Boy leaves behind his son Giles—whose mother was a coed who took too literally the injunction to "love her classmate as herself"—to carry on the Goat-Boy religion and bring the New Curriculum to every campus in the university.
Anything Can Be True. Barth's parable is something like Dante's, a pilgrimage within an invented cosmology. Here and there his prose matches the cool, deadly manner of Swift in dealing in an offhand way with the totally outrageous. He is as gamy as Swift; there are some campus orgies, and sex is kid's play to Goat-Boy. Like Swift, who satirized the casus belli between Britain and France as a dispute between Bigendians and Littlendians, Barth parodies today's split between the technologically similar but ideologically dissimilar East and West. Yet his prime concern is with myth and religion, with the divine and the animal in man.
Barth has produced a black Bible that proceeds not to revelation but to further mystification. At bottom, he seems to be saying that even the bestial can be beautiful if the beholder believes it to be so. He faults man's failure to distinguish pragmatically between truth and belief. And, as in his earlier writings, he bleakly seems to say that anything can be true if it is in the nature of the believer to believe it so.