In “Echo” Barth reworks the myth of Narcissus and Echo as an allegory of the narcissistic self reflexive fiction as a whole, and as a dramatisation of the spatial metaphor of entropy in particular. Likened to other closed systems, metafiction’s narrative processes involve introversions and involutions. These could be translated into the entropic loops that turn output into input, which entails loss of energy and thus exhaustion beyond replenishment. In Ovid’s The Metamorphoses, the mythical donnée of Narcissus is already replete with the genesis of literary entropy, but it is habitualised within the larger context of The Metamorphoses. Narcissus is captivated by his own reflection, imprisoned in a loop of self mirroring, when the nymph Echo
