The variety of moods and techniques and the astonishing erudition of Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano have frustrated critical attempts to grasp the work as a unified whole and have fostered instead an emphasis on decoding and explicating. The generic characteristics that Mikhail Bakhtin discerns in the tradition of Menippean Satire, however, provide a fresh and integral interpretation. Bakhtin's description subsumes such formal and thematic aspects of the work as its suppressed comedy, variety of styles, topicality, wide adaptation of other genres, fantastic inventiveness, frequent sharp contrasts and abrupt transitions, scandalous eccentricity, intellectual seriousness, three-leveled world view, utopianism, and psychological abnormality. These apparently heterogeneous characteristics are organized and unified within both Bakhtin's theory and the book's world by the model of carnival festivity. As an annually recurring celebration of change, carnival allows us, furthermore, to understand Lowry's spatializing sense of the book as “trochal,” like the regularly turning wheel of a machine.