By changing generic codes, subverting traditional literary conventions, employing an unreliable narrator and exploiting the deflective effect of unfamiliar diction, Wolfe creates a text organised specifically to be understood, or at least appreciated, only by those readers who are willing to question their own literary assumptions, pause, reflect and reread.

As a result, The Urth Cycle shares its systematised oracularity with the parable stories, which were constructed ‘with the express purpose of concealing a mystery that was to be understood only by insiders’. In effect, Wolfe is behaving in the manner of Mark's Christ, who explains to his disciples:

Although Wolfe is not attempting to propound a religious doctrine, his adoption of the parable form's surreptitiousness results in the pentalogy constituting an intellectual and interpretative labyrinth, a term often applied by critics and reviewers of the text. He can, therefore, be seen as an analogue of the Borgesian character Bioy Cesares, who

Severian is just such a narrator: unreliable, intensely subjective and seemingly incapable of analysing his experiences. Equally, The Urth Cycle is, itself, the product of Wolfe's ‘great scheme for writing a novel [which] only a handful of readers … would be able to decipher’.

Many of the difficulties that the reader experiences in deciphering the text arise from Wolfe's appropriation of traditional metafictional strategies. These devices are used to create a confusing series of connections between the text itself and what can be termed its ‘hermeneutic circle’, ‘which represents the dynamic process of interpretation in terms of a continual interplay of interpreter and the text, of whole context and individual parts’, and between the action of its heavily intertextual embedded stories and that of the main narrative.