Lost in the Funhouse

“Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents? Such are the questions that beset my intervals of rest.” 

In the opening paragraphs of the book, this quote announces Barth’s self-reflexive narrator, launching the book’s postmodern adventures and establishing the questions the stories Lost In The Funhouse will explore. Right away our narrator wonders whether he invents his journey, and if he himself exists, letting us know this story is one concerned with the inner journey. It signals that there is more to each story than first appears, suggesting the riddles to come.

“Makers and swimmers each generate the other […] any given ‘immortality chain’ could terminate after any number of cycles, so that what was immortal was only the cyclic process of incarnation […] Makers swam and created night-seas and swimmers like ourselves, might be the creation of a larger maker.”

Here, the spermatozoon narrator of “Night-Sea Journey” relates the theory of one of his friends. First, there’s the comical absurd element of giving voice to a spermatozoon. If one can speak, he can surely make friends. As important as the concept of immortality at play here is the idea that the swimmers–spermatozoon’s engaging in their epic night-sea journey towards life–are creations of a larger maker. 

“It was to be my fate to wonder at that moniker, relish and revile it, ignore it, stare it out countenance into hieroglyph and gibber, and come finally if not to embrace at least to accept it with the cold neutrality of self-recognition, whose expression is a thin-lipped smile.” 

This quote, in the closing paragraphs of “Ambrose His Mark,” shows a narrator commenting on his own story. After references to Plato and Saint Ambrose, Ambrose posing this self-reflective question aligns his story with that of legend. Just before this quote, we learn that years passed before his name was added to his birth certificate, and then a blank was left before his surname. In this quote Ambrose wonders about that blank in his story, at times denying it’s true.

“Are you there? If I’m so blind and deaf to you, or you are me, or both’re both. One may be imaginary; I’ve had stranger ideas. I hope I’m a fiction without real hope. When there’s a voice there’s a speaker […] I see I see myself as a halt narrative: first person, tiresome. Pronoun sans ante or precedent, warrant or respite.” 

On the opening page of “Autobiography,” the narrator breaks the wall between book and reader–at least, that’s one way to interpret the opening sentence. Perhaps the narrator is talking to himself, or to Barth. It’s these word games and self-examination, as though reader, character, narrator, and Barth form a Russian nesting doll set. We also see Barth’s self-conscious narrator begin to call attention to the artifice of narrative, and the construction of identity itself. This quote shows how “Autobiography” is less about the narrator’s life and more about the ideas of himself in his life. 

“Even the revelation of my several defects–absence of presence to name one–didn’t fetch me right to despair: crippledness affirms its own heroisms, does it not; heroes are typically gimpish, are they not. But your crippled here’s one thing, a bloody hero after all; your heroic cripple another, etcetcetcetcet. Being an ideal’s warped image, my fancy’s own twist figure, is what undoes me.” 

In the final paragraphs of “Autobiography,” we see the narrator still digging through his consciousness, explaining himself. We’ve received zero information about who this narrator is, or how this story is autobiographical. Is the narrator comparing his inability to write about his life, his inability to understand himself, and the loops of questions his self-examination leads him through, to a crippled hero? We see Barth’s anti-hero motif, as the narrator, or writer, of “Auto-Biography” fights to create narrative resonance. 

“But now stern and solemn horns empowered the theme; abject no more, it grew rich, austere. Cymbals struck and sizzled. He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds like those in Nature’s Secrets. A reedy woodwind warned of hidden peril; on guard, he crept close to the closet with the plucking strings.” 

Here, Barth’s baroque lyricism meets his theme of merging the mythic and personal, through a schoolboy’s point-of-view. We’re following Ambrose’s imagination in this quote: he’s just told his mother she raised a sissy, because of Ambrose’s fear of being bullied on his way home from school. Classical music plays on the radio, launching this moment of free indirect speech. We see Ambrose thinking of himself on epic levels.

“They kissed. Tenderly they rehearsed the secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx’s Den, then he bore her from the jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water. They swam until her tears were made a part of Earth’s waters; then hand in hand they waded shoreward on the track of the moon.” 

This language, a few pages from the end of “Water-Message,” reads like classical romantic poetry. We’re following Ambrose’s imagination again. He and the Sphinxes discover two older locals in their clubhouse, the Sphinx’s Den. Barth lets the imagery run: the woods, which the kids call the jungle, and the nearby beach and water. We also see the theme of love here. This quote points to the power of imagination, through story, to create epic roles for ourselves. Yet in such a young boy as Ambrose, comic notes also abound.

“But with her assistance he would become a new man, he declared, and promised ominously to ‘get rid,’‘one way or another,’ of ‘the monkey on his back,’ which had kept him to date from single-minded application to anything […] She was his hope of redemption, he went on, becoming fatuous and sentimental now in his anxiety; without her he was no better than a beast (as if he weren’t beastly with her!), no more than half a man.” 

Here, Barth’s Siamese twin narrator explains how his twin changed after falling in love with a woman named Thalia. His twin tried to kill the narrator. What’s important here is that the story rises to metaphor. It can be read as though the Siamese twins represent, respectively, a man and his mind. The narrator represents the mind, while his brother represents physical needsand desire. The theme of love returns, and the narrator suggests love is the only thing capable of transforming the uglier of the two twins into something more than a beast. 

“There was no mistaking it, another woman looked out at me from behind that mask: a prisoner like myself, whose gaze remained level and detached however her heartless warden grinned and grimaced. I saw her the next night and the next, earnest, mute; by day she disappears in the other Thalia; I live only for the night to rehearse before her steadfast eyes the pity and terror of our situation.”

As “Petition” comes to a close, the narrator imagines he sees a second Thalia in the women his twin falls in love with. This quote mirrors Barth’s self-reflexive wordplayand extends the play from the narrator to characters within the story. The narrator is essentially a second-self to his twin, as is the Thalia the narrator sees, or imagines. This quote demonstrates how Barth continues to twist and turn reader expectations; the story goes from comic to tragic and epic, yet never lands steadfast in any one place.

“Actually, if one imagines a story called ‘The Funhouse,’ or ‘Lost In The Funhouse,’ the details of the drive to Ocean City don’t seem especially relevant. The beginning should recount the events between Ambrose’s first sight of the funhouse early in the afternoon and his entering it with Magda and Peter in the evening.”

In the titular story, we see Barth once again call attention to the artifice of narrative. The paragraph goes on to describe how the middle of a story works, reading like an essay on the techniques of narrative realist fiction. The quote shows Ambrose in his third and final connected story in the book. We see Barth setting the stage for what occurs later in the story, when the narrator, Ambrose, and the reader are lost in the funhouse together. 

“If you knew all the stories behind all the people on the boardwalk, you’d see that nothing was what it looked like. Husbands and wives often hated each other; parents didn’t necessarily love their children; et cetera […] Therefore each saw himself as the hero of the story, when the truth might turn out to be that he’s the villain or the coward. And there wasn’t one thing you could do about it.”

Barth’s concepts, and his narrator’s self-reflexivity, rise towards a peak here. The language raises the Ocean City boardwalk to legend and plays on legends of under-the-boardwalk activity. Before entering the boardwalk funhouse with Magda, Ambrose imagines his father should have told him all this about the boardwalk. The quote occurs after Uncle Karl and Peter have dragged Marta by her ankles, and Ambrose’s mother has teased Karl. At play is the now thirteen-year-old Ambrose’s fear and imagination: he thinks of himself, and everyone, as the hero of their own story. Yet Karl’s getting teased injects the scene with comic tones, as Barth plays with ambiguity. 

“He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator –though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.” 

This final paragraph of “Lost In The Funhouse” suggests the narrator’s stuck in his own games. Only pages before, Ambrose gets lost in the funhouses’ mirror maze, or so we’re told: “He wondered at the endless replication of his image in the mirrors […] as he lost himself in the reflection” (90). Note the language of love and ambiguity we’re left with in the final sentence. Barth knows his games push readers’ patience and wants reader participation, to push literature into a new place, or at least to shake it free from exhausted traditions.

“Now where are we? That is to say, where are Tiresias and Narcissus. Somewhere near the Donaconan Spring. Who’s telling the story, and to whom? The teller’s immaterial, Tiresias declares; the tale’s the same, and for all one knows the speaker may be the only auditor.” 

About halfway through Lost In The Funhouse, and halfway through “Echo,” the narrator pauses the narrative. This classic narrative device often gives an author time for exposition or characterization. Instead, the narrator, here, asks himself, or the reader where are we. Once again, Barth calls attention to narrative’s artifice. If “Echo” imagines Greek mythological figures still entangled in their tales, this quote demonstrates Barth’s theme that stories are immortal. That Tiresias declares the teller immaterial suggests the voice of the storyteller is also immortal, an identity almost separate from the narrator. Barth’s intentions here are for the reader to imagine themselves in mythological terms, and perhaps even to empower the reader to envision they are Tiresias. It also suggests the inability to find ultimate truth about who we are, and if we are real or fiction.

“Until I’d murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn’t wise enough to see I was Oedipus. Too late now to keep the polar cap from melting. Venice subsides; South America explodes.” 

Here, many of Barth’s narrative tactics are at play. Who’s the speaker? This section of the two-fragment story is labeled Lake Erie. How can Oedipus, a Greek God, appear at Lake Eerie? We see Barth play with the idea of immortality. By connecting this moment to Lake Eerie, and connecting it to myth, Europe, and South America, we see a glimpse of western civilization that simultaneously gives rise to stories thousands of years old and the present moment. 

“No climax. There’s the story. Finished? Not quite. Story of our lives. The last word in fiction, in fact. I choose the first-person narrative viewpoint in order to reflect interest from the peculiarities of technique (such as the normally unbearable self-consciousness, the abstraction and the blank).” 

As the narrator in “Title” writes about how to write the story of his life, his frustration grows. In this quote, halfway through the story, the narrator makes as though he’s poised to quit his self-reflexive investigations. The meter opens fast. The tone’s decisive. Paragraphs earlier, the narrator says the demise of the novel and short story needn’t be the end of narrative art. Here, he speculates as to the future of narrative. Will it have no climax? This is one of many quotes that demonstrates Barth’s wordplay, his raising questions about the authority of meaning. And, as usual, the answer remains ambiguous, while the text dives into explanations of narrative technique. 

“The laureled clairvoyants tell our doom in riddles. Sewn in our robes are horrid tales, and the speakers-in-tongues enounce atrocious tidings. The prophet-birds seem to speak sagely, but are shrieking their frustration. The senselessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message, a prayer.” 

This reads as though Barth’s narrator has tapped into an immortal voice capable not of interpreting his messagebut poeticizing it and raising its contents to great importance. Who are the laureled clairvoyants? Are they the speakers we meet in “Glossalalia?” Or are they the mythological figures who appear throughout the book? This is classical allegory. “The senselessest babble” may be read as the voice that narrates all humankind’s stories, alluding to the burning bush. But Barth bucks clarity; it’s an ambiguous symbol, designed to awake our mystery and wonder in stories and what message they might contain. 

“Had he written for his reader’s sake? The phrase implied a thiherto-unappreciated metaphysical dimension. Suspense. If his life was a fictional narrative, it consisted of three terms–teller, tale, told–each dependent on the other two but not in the same ways.” 

This is another of Barth’s self-reflexive intellectual wordplay riddles, couched within discussion of classic works, like Arabian Nights, and authors like Proust and Mann. We see the narrator wanting to even evaluate himself on epic proportions. Only a few lines later, we see the narrator toy with accepting the fact that he is actually a fiction of the author.

“More, he could demonstrate by syllogism that the story of his life was a work of fact: though assaults upon the boundary between life and art, reality and dream, were undeniably a staple of his own and his century’s literature as they’d been of Shakespeare’s and Cervantes’s, yet it was a fact that in the corpus of fiction as far as he knew no fictional character had become convinced as had he that he was a character in a work of fiction.” 

We’re unsure who narrates “Life-Story.” Is it Barth? The narrator of the collection? A narrator unique to this story? So, we see Barth continue to conflate writer, narrator, character, and reader, blending art and reality. In this story he does so numerous times, asking if—and then deciding he is—a character in a fiction. Here, mythological references merge with modern classical legendary writers, as though the narrator inserts himself into their conversation. 

“He knew who others were–Odysseus, resourceful, great Great Ajax, and the rest. Who was he? Whose eyes, at the wedding of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, had laid hold of bridesmaid Helen’s image and never since let go? While others wooed he brooded, played at princing, grappling idly with the truth that those within his imagination’s grasp–which was to say everyone but Menelaus–seemed to him finally imaginary, and he alone, ungraspable, real.”

Barth applies his self-reflexive techniques to a mythological figure. Note conflating Barth’s fictional Menelaiad with Menelaus, amidst the poetic imagery and rhythm. Here, past two-thirds of the way through “Menelaiad,” we see Barth’s reimagined mythological figure’s solipsistic thoughts. If Menelaiad is real, who invents the other characters in this story? This quote occurs at the end of a long paragraph of dialogue, which begins inside a series of quotation marks [ “ ‘ “ ‘ “ ‘]. It’s difficult to unwind who’s speaking. Barth wants to raise the question and leave us with ambiguity. But only so much as to raise reader’s curiosity, and to keep us reading. 

‘ “All these years I’ve languished in Pharos, chaste and comfy, waiting for you, while Paris, nothing wiser, fetched Cloud-Helen off to Troy, made her his mistress […] It wasn’t I, but Cloud-Helen you fetched from Troy, whom Proteus dissolved the noon you beached him. When you then went off to account to Aphrodite, I slipped aboard. Here I am. I love you.” ” 

As “Menelaiad” gives new voice to mythological figures, Helen pokes fun at Menelaiad’s years at sea, searching for her after the Trojan War. She suggests she loved Menelaiad the whole time she was with Paris during the war, and says the Gods turned her into a ghost. If this is true, the Trojan War was fought over a ghost. Here, Barth satirizes the theme of a hero’s love. Note the maze of dialogue tags before the quote. Barth plays with syntactic form as another means of disrupting our preconceived notions about who these mythological figures are and who’s speaking about them. 

“Ajax is dead, Agamemnon, all my friends, but I can’t die, worse luck; Menelaus’ carcass is long-wormed, yet his voice yans on through everything, to itself. Not my voice, I am this voice, the rest has changed, rechanged, gone. The voice too, even that changes, becomes hoarser, loses its magnetism, grows scratchy, incoherent, blank.” 

In the final section of the story, the dialogue tags disappear, and we’re sure the narrator’s speaking. Sentences before this, we’re told that when the narrator understood Proteus became Menelaus on the beach, holding Old Man of the Sea, Menelaus ceased. All of Barth’s metafictional themes are at play here. The narrator believes he’s put a rest perhaps to mythological voices but not to the voice of the storyteller. We’re left with ambiguity. 

“While the other fellows played with their spears, I learned to play the lyre. I wasn’t the worst-looking man in Argolis; I had a ready wit and a good ear, and knew how to amuse the ladies. A little more of those virtues (and a lot more nerve, and better luck in the noble birth way), I might have been another Paris.” 

Here, the minstrel in “Anonymiad” voices heroic ambitions. The quote appears a few pages in, as the minstrel interrupts his writing the epic poem that opens the story. Right before, the minstrel expresses derision for Helen’s whoring, and Menelaus’ noise. As such, this leads us to associate his comments with his own thoughts about this situation. The minstrel wants what he can never have. There’s irony here as the minstrel, who uses beautiful language, derides Paris for having a honey tongue. We’ve already learned the minstrel’s vision to write an epic. More, as the story progresses, the minstrel confesses men like him love their work more than their woman. A few times in this story the minstrel attacks his own abilities. This mirrors the self-reflexivity we’ve seen throughout the book. 

“I gloried in my isolation and seeded the waters with its get, what I came to call fiction. That is, I found that by pretending that things had happened which in fact had not, and that people existed who didn’t, I could achieve a lovely truth which actuality obscures–especially when I learned to abandon myth and pattern my fabrications on actual people and events: Menelaus, Helen, the Trojan War.” 

As the story, and book, winds to a close, the minstrel celebrates his abilities of invention. There’s satire and irony here. Menelaus and Helen are mythological figures, yet the minstrel says they’re real. We’re left to wonder if his entire tale of abandonment by Aegisthus on the beach at Pharos is a fabrication. Once again, the narrator calls attention to the artifice and invention of story and raises the question of whether this story exists only in the minstrel’s head, another example of Barth’s metafictional concepts playing out in the narrative.