Simon takes his metaphor of the labyrinth very seriously in interpreting comedy, but it is not the classical labyrinth built by Daedalus to confine the Minotaur. Simon's labyrinth is really a maze constructed out of mirrors so that every discrete item in the history of comedy reflects something else. This endows Simon's study of comedy with a metacomic aspect, as if all of historical comedy were a reflection on itself and had no referents in the real world outside. Thus, “Meredith multiplies the complexities of the labyrinth and in the reflections of the mirrors within mirrors produces at least two additional layers of text: a history of comic literature from Aristophanes to the nineteenth century and a survey of the major prose styles of the nineteenth century” (p. 155). Fielding's texts- Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones- “metamorphose into all of comic literature; then, from a slightly different angle again, into nineteenth-century literature” (p. 155).

Simon seems in almost mystical pursuit of the unity that is infinitely