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.
“Title”-“Life-Story”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Title”
“Title” calls attention to the artifice of story and explores the narrator’s dissatisfaction with life’s monotony, that “everything leads to nothing” (102), and the human need to fill our time here, as though it’s a blank, with dramas and character-types that have become exhausted. It lives in ambiguity, lamenting and celebrating the artifice of language. The narrator laments that our stories are essentially the same, rooted in a he-finds-her or he-waits-for-her heroic quest. “Title” picks up where “Lost In The Funhouse” left off with the narrator replacing dramatic exposition—and here, character—with explanations of writing techniques. As “Title” progresses, the narrator states he needs to get on with it: it’s getting boring, but he’s got to keep telling the story. Barth contrasts the fact “the world might end before this sentence” (105)”, with humanity’s undying need to tell stories.
Instead of story, the narrator says, “Perhaps adjective period Whether in a people, an art, a love affair, on a fourth term […] In the name of suffering humanity cease this harangue. It’s over. Is there a plot here? What’s all this leading up to? No climax. There’s the story. Finished. Not quite. Story of our lives” (106).
Despite the exhausted nature of our human drama, “Title” contends the show must go on. The narrator explores abstractions, fearing this creates literature amounting to nonsense. Sculpture is a form more suited to that work. This is why we’re told, in the Author’s Note, that “Title” “makes somewhat separate but equally valid senses in several different types of media, and not just print. Here, we have a story where the narrator intersperses elements, and explanations, of craft technique into philosophical reflection about the merits of story. He wants to find new ways to tell a story, yet he finds disturbing merit in elements of craft, as well as human drama:
What goes on between them is still not only the most interesting but the most important thing in the bloody murderous world, pardon the adjectives. And that my dear is what writers have got to find ways to write about in this adjective adjective hour [...] that is to say our, accursed self-consciousness will lead them […] Say it in plain English for once, that’s what I’m leading up to (109).
Story Summary: “Glossolalia”
Here, the narrator accesses the voices of different legends and scribes throughout time and presents a brief glossary–one paragraph each–featuring each voice. The narrator inserts himself into mythical conversations, as, once again, Barth wants to merge the mythic and individual into a new epic. The question to ask here is who is the narrator? “Glossolalia” reads as if we’re walking through a library and various voices call out. In the Author’s Note, Barth informs it must be read aloud to be understood.
“Still breathless from fending Phoebus,” the story opens, “suddenly I see all” (111). The story immediately reckons with Phoebus Apollo, of Greek mythology, a major deity of prophecy, truth, and music. This reveals the author’s intentions to make a profound statement. It carries the theme we’ve seen of each narrator in Lost In The Funhouse,exploring the legends, and history, that compose their identity. The story continues, documenting history’s horror: rape. The third fragment takes us to biblical times: “I Crispus, a man of Corinth, yesterday looked on God” (111.) Later, we hear a language that is not English: “Ed’ plut, kondo nedode” (111). Finally, we reach the conclusion: “The laureled clairvoyants tell our doom in riddles. Sewn in our robes are horrid tales […] The senselessest babble, could we ken it, might disclose a dark message or prayer” (112). Though Barth has spent much of Lost In The Funhouse deconstructing and poking fun at the artifice of story and language, he wants to reawaken a readerto the power and mystery of truths, language, and story.
Story Summary: “Life-Story”
The concepts Barth has suggested throughout Lost In The Funhouse make their way into this self-conscious narrative. “Life-Story,” which is separated into three parts,asks if the narrator is himself a character in a novel. The narrator concludes “his conviction was false” (126). In a postmodern move, the narrator critiques the story, wondering if he’s stuck in his own roman-à-clef (a story based on autobiography) as it’s being composed. He disrupts the narrative, pointing out narrative methods. References to Arabian Nights and rigorous self-reflexive postmodern authors like Borges and Proust further Barth’s thematic ambitions of merging the personal with the epic. The narrator promises straightforwardness concerning dramatic representation of his life and to circle around that idea with intellectual riddles, pointing out how bothersome this is for a reader.
Part I and II begin with almost identical sentences. The narrator wishes he could throw away his life story and start anew. As the story opens, “D comes to suspect that the world is a novel, himself a fictional personage” (113). At last, we see pushback as the narrator argues his case: “‘You say you lack a ground situation. Has it occurred to you that that circumstance may be your ground-situation?’” (115).
In Part II, the narrator insults the reader, questioning why the masochistic reader has read through such disrupted and fragmented narratives to this point. The narrator–in beautiful language–conflates his wife with the fantasy (in the actual story he’s writing) of his mistress. Here, we see reality and fantasy blend. It feels new, at least different from conventional realism of any kind. The story utilizes techniques such as naming characters “D,” or “K,” a realist technique criticized in the title story, “Lost In The Funhouse.” This signals Barth’s attempt to give new life to old symbols that he thought dead.
“Title”-“Life-Story” Analysis
In these three stories, Barth further develops his themes of merging the personal and epic. After spending time dismantling traditional realist narrative, in these stories, our narrator wants us to know literature is not dead but evolving. Here, Barth’s postmodern techniques crystallize.
In “Title” we’re told, “The devise of the novel and short story [...] needn’t be the end of narrative art […] The end of one road might be the beginning of another” (106). It’s as though the narrator’s convincing himself, or trying to. The question is why write this kind of story. Barth wants to stimulate readers’ rhetorical investigations, and wants us to join his journey into a new world of literature. As much as Barth decries narrative’s old-fashioned methods, he loves the idea of the message a story delivers. Indeed, Lost In The Funhouse is both medium and message.
For example, “Glossalalia,” is best understood read aloud, we’re told in the Author’s Note, and we might ask if Barth want the reader to perform. Again, Barth steeps the reader in ancient myth, drawing on legends from different cultures. This story’s structure suggests each image occurs simultaneously. The effect is that a moment gets stretched from its place in time into infinity, as Barth always wants us thinking beyond the present scene.
Barth can no longer accept an omniscient third-person narrator, a realist staple. “Life-Story” reads as though Barth–or his self-reflexive narrator–puts his theories into practice. As we began with a Mobius strip in “Frame-Tale,” and revisited the idea in “Lost In The Funhouse,” we see this concept pushed further in “Life-Story,” as the narrator wonders if he is a character in a novel. References to Arabian Nights, and postmodern authors like Borges, suggest not only is the narrator stuck in a novel, he’s stuck in a global transcultural novel that some author began writing thousands of years ago and is still unfinished. When the narrator imagines his wife as his mistress, fantasy slides into reality. Once again Barth–or his narrator–claims he’ll tell a straightforward story that includes dramatic exposition, dialogue, and characterization. Instead, he philosophically investigates his own identity. The end effect presents a character so steeped in myth he cannot tell the difference between story and reality. We’re left to wonder if he’ll ever be able to decipher this or if he’s forever running in circles trying to figure out the answer, asking the same questions about existence, and telling the same stories. No matter how self-conscious the narrator is concerning the artifice of story and language, he’s bound to try and create a story that provides a meaningful answer.
