At one point in The Public Burning, Robert Coover's “Historical Romance, ” a man exits from a theater into the Times Square area where Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are to be executed. He takes in the scene before him. “People are carrying signs that his right eye tells him read save the rosenbergs! and heil eisenhower!, his left bomb china now! and ethel rosenberg bewitched my baby! He is no longer surprised by these ocular reversals, in fact he is very clear-headed, which is the main cause of his panic. It strikes him that he is perhaps the only sane man left on the face of the earth” (356). If he is, he has more cause to panic than he knows – the reason he sees things as he does is because he has neglected to remove his 3-D glasses upon leaving the movie. If what he sees through those lenses passes for sanity, how much more insane must the unrefracted world be.

Most authors today would find Coover's scene a paradigmatic expression of what contemporary life is like. Most also would find Coover's scene paradigmatic of what contemporary American life is like, the double vision of its unnamed man an apt representation of a country whose schizophrenia finally has come to the surface. It is when critics evaluate such scenes that problems arise. Some contend that an environment of disorder invalidates any order proposed in art.