39 pages • 1 hour read
John BarthLost in the Funhouse
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Lost In The Funhouse”-“Two Meditations”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Lost in the Funhouse”
Here, Ambrose returns, as we join the family’s Independence Day drive to the Ocean City beach and boardwalk funhouse. Instead of exposition and details about the journey, save for minor physical descriptions, like “two straps discernible through the shoulders of her sun dress” (72), Barth alternates delivering random detailswith describing in technical terms how a realist story proceeds. We receive essentially no description of the funhouse; instead, we follow a discursive narrator stuck in a mirror maze, a metaphor for consciousness and our attempts to understand the self. This technique subverts a traditional teenage ideal love narrative, and the notion of the narrator as hero, replacing these with self-reflexive intellectualizing.
Ambrose and his brother Peter want to impress Magda, a fourteen-year-old girl, who sits between them in the car. Up front, Uncle Karl smokes and makes inappropriate remarkswhile Ambrose’s mother–seated between her husband and Karl–playfully chides Karl. Meanwhile, the narrator interrupts to share: “A fine metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, in addition to its obvious ‘first-order’ relevance to the thing it describes, will be seen upon reflection to have a second order of significance” (71). Before this, the narrator references James Joyce’s Ulysses. Barth wants the readers drawing connections between artifice and bothUlysses and Ambrose’s day trip.
Barth writes, “If one imagines a story called ‘Lost In The Funhouse’ the details of the drive to Ocean City don’t seem especially relevant” (74). This is ironic, because the drive occupies three-quarters of the story. “What is the story’s theme?” (76) we’re asked, while Uncle Karl reminds the kids not to go under the boardwalk. The middle of the story is the visit to the beach; it’s closed, so they go to a pool, where Uncle Karl and Pete drag Magda by her ankles because she doesn’t feel like swimming. The narrator theorizes about the high-dive instead of jumping off.
They eventually make it to the funhouse. Ambrose imagines getting lost forever “in one of its labyrinthine corridors […] He died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark” (92). We’re told a woman in the partition between the boards in the walls hears him. Meanwhile, Barth’s interjections about how a story usually works continue. The narrator explains–and diagrams–a story’s rising action, climax, and falling action, then tells us a reader gets bored with these games. Ambrose dreams of creating a marvelous funhouse but “nobody has enough imagination” (93). In the end, we’re left to wonder if Ambrose, or the narrator, will ever get out of the funhouse, and if the funhouse isn’t a story Ambrose is telling in his head. We know nothing of what happens between Ambrose and Magda.
Story Summary: “Echo”
In “Echo,” Barth investigates the minds of Tiresias, Narcissus, and Echo–the blind prophet, god, and nymph from Greek mythology–giving new light to their ancient storywhile exploring the concept of immortality. Here, characters forever chase their own stories. Barth wonders if they, and thus we, are “still in the Thespian cave?” (100), suggesting that all of our stories take place in our minds. We are Tiresias, because we are blind to our needs; Narcissus, as we are only able to see our self’s enjoyment; and Echo, in that we repeat our failures.
As the story opens, the narrator wonders why Tiresias is not in Thebes but rather is speaking with Narcissus and Echo. The narrator asks: “Who’s telling the story and to whom?” (98). Tiresias, in vain, tries to warn the nymph Echo of Narcissus’ self-love. The narrator wonders if Narcissus takes Tiresias’ advice to love someone else, and if Echo simply repeats his tale. It’s a story that suggests the impossibility and danger of self-discovery. For both Oedipus and Narcissus self-knowledge proved fatal: “Narcissus would appear to be opposite Echo: he perishes by denying all except himself; she persists by effacing herself absolutely. Yet they come to the same […] His death must be partial as his self-knowledge, the voice persists” (99). In the end, the story wonders if these legendary characters to myths of love and lust exist in our minds, and equates our lives to those of mythological figures, furthering Barth’s theme of the personal as epic. “We linger on forever on the autognostic verge,” the narrator says, “not you and I, but Narcissus, Tiresias, Echo” (100).
Story Summary: “Two Meditations”
True to its title, “Two Meditations” contains two probing diary-like entries that connect the instant to infinity, and connect the local to the global. Labeled, “1. Niagara Falls” (101), in the first meditation, a woman drinks a glass of water at a window; Barth then adds, “Or she merely sat in an empty study” (101). We are unsure if this second image here is the woman’s memory or altogether a new image. Barth writers, “For ages the fault creeps secret through the rock (101). This sentence makes it seem as if this instant, or the memory involved in it, is something that has evolved since ancient times.
The second entry, labeled “2. Lake Eerie” tells us: “I wasn’t wise enough to see I was Oedipus […] Venice subsides; South America explodes” (101). We are not told who this meditation belongs to. The language brings us from the instant, which wesuppose occurs at or is connected with Lake Eerie, to Venice and South America.
“Lost In The Funhouse”-“Two Meditations” Analysis
These stories develop Barth’s mission to find new ways of storytelling that reinvigorate a reader. “Lost in the Funhouse” calls attention to its own artifice. “Echo” gives agency to players from Greek mythology, chaining their story to ours. “Two Meditations” defies traditional reader expectations and lives in ambiguity, a classic postmodern technique. It’s important to remember Barth’s metaphysical motives when interpreting his stories. Barth wants readers to ask exactly what a story is, where it comes from, and how it passes through generations.
“Lost in the Funhouse” is our third and final story with Ambrose’s family. Once again, the narrator presents the childishness and celebrates the intellectualism of a hero’s journey. Traditional expectations say we expect a narrative arc connecting the three Ambrose stories. Instead, character, the voice of a precocious teen, and theme unite them. Ambrose is thirteen, the story no longer about childhood. But where a reader expects exposition and dramatization, the narrator explains this is the spot in the story where exposition occurs: “The function of the story is to introduce the characters [and] set the scene for the main action” (73), we’re told one-third of the way through. The story about the funhouse takes place mostly in the car, and the narrator points this out. In the funhouse, Ambrose intellectualizes about story and imagines getting stuck forever in the mirror-maze, instead of showing us the maze. The narrator points out a thirteen-year-old doesn’t think this way. Barth wants to break-up our experience, to jostle the reader into the story. By explaining literary techniques, he wants to call attention to the illusion and artifice of story, and of ourselves. We’re told even realism “is an illusion that is being enhanced” (69).
“Echo” continues Barth’s theme of merging the personal and epic. By accessing the minds of players from Greek mythology, Barth explores the power of imagination and myth. He asks who tells the story to whom. The story suggests that each of us is forever telling ourselves our own story, while someone else may see our character differently. Tiresias’ failures hint at our blindness, Narcissus’ self-love resonates with our self-interest, and Echo shows how this story exists in each of us. It’s about human nature.
“Two Meditations” appears after calling attention to the artifice of a story in “Lost in the Funhouse.” Then in “Echo” the narrator asks who’s telling the story. In “Two Meditations” we’re never told who’s telling and are left to wonder who these meditations belong to, if they occurred in the places the label suggests. In addition, each meditation connects a reader to the feeling of eternity, transporting them from their spot with the book in their hands, to Venice and South America, suggesting the power of an ordinary moment. Barth brings images together in this ambiguous hodgepodge pastiche, a postmodern craft technique, and in this way a small moment expands to contain continents. This form raises the question of what composes a story. It reads more like a revelation. Together, the three subvert traditional hero quest narratives, furthering Barth’s metaphysical investigations.
