Lost in the Funhouse

John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse is a collection of self-reflexive stories that stray from traditional realist narrative methods while calling attention to the artifice of narrative technique. It features stories narrated by a spermatozoon journeying to the ovum, a Siamese twin attached belly to rear to his brother, and characters from Greek mythology. In one tale, a teenager gets lost in a funhouse mirror maze. Steeped in allusions to Greek mythology, Arabic, and postmodern writers like Borges, the collection seeks to merge personal stories with the epic while satirizing classic hero narrativesand themes like love, as well as stories that follow the realist rising action, climax, falling action, denouement form. Often, Barth’s stories end on an ambiguous note.

In 1967, one year before publishing Lost in the Funhouse, Barth published “The Literature of Exhaustion,” an essay that critics pared down to being about the death of the novel. Barth believed realist narrative techniques were exhausted, and readers bored. Key to understanding Barth is understanding the narrative ambitions expressed in this essay. Barth is writing into a culture where postmodern literature has assumed the role of deconstructing the world around us, from story to history to identity. Barth’s oeuvre represents a literary investigation of these concepts using new techniques as much as realist authors like Tolstoy and Conrad invented techniques for building characters that represented symbols, a technique adopted from theatre. For Barth, if those symbols were great, but old-fashioned, the theatre of story was alive. Barth asks how can we move forward into new narrative territory. Part of Barth’s response relies on technique: he points out the artifice of story and language itself, probes the philosophical realm, finds the nature of the self to be elusive. How can this be represented through story in an awakening way? Barth addresses these concerns in Lost in the Funhouse, and the Author’s Note, before the story, suggests various modes of storytelling beyond print. We’re told “Night-Sea Journey” was meant for print or recorded authorial voice; “Echo” is meant for monophonic tape and a visible but silent author. It lets readers know to expect a new experience.

The appearance of Ambrose in three stories signals Barth’s nod towards a realist narrative arc. We see a boy’s birthmark give rise to an epic family legend in “Ambrose His Mark.” “Water-Message” presents Ambrose’s boyhood gang the Sphinxes, further developing Barth’s theme of merging the epic and mythic. Finally, in “Lost in the Funhouse,” Ambrose is 13, on a maybe-date competing against his older brother for a girl named Magda. On Independence Day, they visit the Ocean City boardwalk. The narrator comments on narrative technique, bucking characterization, and Ambrose imagines he’s stuck forever in the funhouse.