Myth and Carnival in Robert Coover's “The Public Burning”

Abstract

Fictions, Coover tells us, are social rituals instituting a sense of reality. In The Public Burning, reality as recorded in the official documents of the Rosenberg trial amounts to nothing more than the fiction created by the novel's first person narrator, Richard Nixon. Nixon's monologic historia is a sacrificial ritual which aims at renewing (quite literally, making novel) the very myth of America—and Coover's seems to be a final ritual performed to release the hold of that myth.