39 pages • 1 hour read
Lost in the Funhouse
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Themes
The Individual’s Mythic Journey
A major theme in Lost in the Funhouse is the idea that each individual pursues their own mythic journey. The one sentence in the opening story, “Frame-Tale,” alludes to fairytale language: “Once upon a time there was a story that began” (1-2). The opening sentence of the next story, “Night-Sea Journey,” sets the theme of the book’s intentions: “No matter which theory of our journey is correct, it’s myself I address” (3). This sentence establishes the I, the individual, who’s exploring a personal journey.
As the collection progresses, Barth’s allusions to Greek mythology, in stories like “Autobiography,” “Ambrose His Mark,” and “Menelaiad,” frame the individual’s journey within the context of specific legends from the Odyssey. On numerous occasions, and at great length, Lost in the Funhouse alludes to the Trojan War and its major players: Odysseus, Helen of Troy, Paris, Agamemnon, Clytemnestra. In stories like “Auto-Biography,” when Barth calls attention to the artifice of narrative craft, he wants us to connect this artifice with the writing of books like the Odyssey,and ask what can be gained–as individuals interested in life’s personal journeys—from knowing these legends were written to enhance an illusion of reality.
We are born into a world already rich with stories and legends, making it impossible to divorce our identities from our associations to these legends. Barth wants us to think of our lives, our wants and desires, as epic. He also wants to push literature into a place where the lines between fiction and reality blend. Every story in this collection alludes to a journey. “Menelaiad” pokes fun at grand quests, as does “Night-Sea Journey.” Yet the minstrel in “Anonymiad” voices tragic loneliness. Barth wants us to wonder if our lives are myths or real.
Love
Throughout Lost in the Funhouse, the theme of love undergoes numerous variations. Famous romances are satirized in “Menelaiad.” Menelaus repeatedly begs Helen to answer why she made him suffer and chase after her, launching the Trojan War. Her answer: “Love” (150). Teenage crushes rise to epic proportions in “Lost In The Funhouse.” Barth pokes fun at love letters stuffed in bottles and tossed to sea–Ambrose finds a letter with the words blotted out –in “Water-Message.” In “Night-Sea Journey,” the spermatozoon narrator jokes that love is the reason they swim and the reason for the many millions dead along the way.
But when Aegisthus leaves the minstrel behind in “Anonymiad,” his tragic longing shifts the satirical attitude in “Menelaiad” and produces lyrical imagery, suggesting the power and beauty of love.
We’re left to wonder why Barth puts us through the twists and turns of love, and often satirize it throughout the collection, only to explore poignant images of love in the closing pages. It suggests the importance of love in our personal journey, while letting us laugh at the blunders of the past. There’s elements of self-renewal here, as well as Anonymiad’s invention of paradise: “In my favorite ending we became friends: gentle lovers, affectionate and lively”; “I called her by the name of that bee-sweet form I’d graced her with […] I tried imagining her mad with passion for me” (184)”. Barth adds, “It was this invention saved me, for better or worse” (185). Note the ambiguity– it’s as though Barth wants us to believe, not believe, and then believe in love.
Narrative Voice
The presence of a unique voice is a major craft technique in postmodern literature, as evidenced in Lost in the Funhouse. Voice describes the sound of the narrator and the characters, the cadence and quirks, allusions, and colloquialisms. Since Barth believes realist narrative techniques are old-fashioned, he exposes the artifice behind an omniscient third-person narrator, famous in nineteenth-century novels likeAnna Karenina. The first-person is essential throughout, as in “Autobiography,” and “Anonymiad.” Yet some stories are told in third-person, which raise questions–surely, Barth’s intention–about who narrates Lost in the Funhouse. We first meet Ambrose in “Ambrose His Mark” through a first-person narrator. Yet in “Water-Message,” a third-person narrator narrates Ambrose’s afternoon.
“But now stern and solemn horns empowered the theme; abject no more, it grew rich, austere” (43) Barth writes, assuming the voice of young Ambrose in “Water-Message,” adding, “Cymbals struck and sizzled. He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds […] A reedy woodwind warned of hidden peril” (43). Note the lyric mythic allusions–this, when Ambrose and a friend throw sticks on a beach.
Meanwhile, in “Petition,” we hear, in first-person, from the Siamese twin fused belly to back to his brother:
However radically, therefore, our opposition restricts our freedom, we each had come to feel, I believe, that the next real violence between us would be the last, fatal to one and thus to both, and so were more or less resigned to languishing, disgruntled, in our impasse, for want of alternatives (62).
Here, the voice interrupts itself, yet moves quickly, much like the structure of Lost in the Funhouse. It is language for language’s sake. This narrator is as lyrical and pithy as Ambrose was in “Ambrose His Mark” and the third-person narrator was in “Water-Message.” Voice becomes one of the major techniques, rising to thematic importance, Barth uses to conflate his narrator with the author, to produce animated literature, and to blend the lines of fiction and reality.
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