Dudić 1

Robyn Dudić
23 February 2018

Postmodernism and John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse (1968)

Postmodernism is the end of rules; it is the end of knowledge and truth as we know it.
It is the end of reality. Authority is gone; God is gone; definitions are gone. Postmodernism
means the lack of definition. Its precise definition lies in its impreciseness, the definition is
impreciseness, it is not having a definition. Reality is distorted and fragmented; rules, borders
and structures are deposed. It calls the end of all previous periods that interminably tried to
define and redefine structures, directions and regulations. Postmodernism appears to have ex-
ploded, or rather imploded said statutes. It is a melange, a bricolage of already existing shades
and pieces of reality – anew transformed and evolved. Postmodernism, according to Christo-
pher Butler (2002) “depends on the maintenance of a sceptical attitude”, where “’master narra-
tives’ are in crisis and in decline” (13), authority questioned and both language and, thus, reality
deconstructed. Authors of postmodernism apply various techniques to explore the limits of dif-
ferent systems of communication. Nothing is reliable anymore, universal truth does not exist
and nothing is naturally given but culturally constructed (Butler 16-17), “The postmodernist
deconstructor wishes then to show how a previously trusted relationship, like the one between
language and the world, will go astray” (Butler 18) and thus, “calls into question the relationship
between the narrative account and the world that it [postmodernism] describes” (March-Russell
226). In his short story Lost in the Funhouse (1968), John Barth allows his readers to identify
with the postmodern subject when he skilfully depicts distortion and fragmentation of reality
by using the postmodern techniques of metafictionality, the questioning of authority and the
death of the author.

Providing theory to said concepts at first, passages of the story are then analysed in order
to show why Lost in the Funhouse perfectly fits into the period of postmodernism. Firstly, met-
afictionality is discussed, including both, other scholar’s viewpoints, as well as John Barth’s
opinion on the matter, as well. Accordingly, targeting reader involvement and the importance
of the author, the second part of this paper deals with the questioned authority of both, the
author and reality, applying the concept of the death of the author. Relating everything to the
postmodern concept of distortion and fragmentation throughout the whole paper, the final con-
clusion recaptures all arguments discussed, summing up why the short story can be labelled
postmodernist. On the last page, a list of all cited sources is to be found.
 Dudić 2

In said short story, the central character Ambrose tries to write a story about himself.
Being thirteen, he is in love with Magda, with whom he, together with his older brother Peter,
his uncle and parents, drives to Ocean City to visit a funhouse. Entering the attraction, Peter
and Magda leave Ambrose alone, who gets lost in the labyrinthic halls of the funhouse, loosing
himself surrounded by mirrors. All the way through, Ambrose is reflecting upon the process of
writing and its accuracy of representing reality. Questioning meaning, he finally even doubts
his own existence.

Being a postmodernist story, where literature became free in addressing itself, “a text”,
as Deborah A. Woolley (1985) cites and translates Philippe Sollers (1968) “‘n'apparait que pour
s'effacer et réciter cette apparition qui s'efface’ (‘appears only in order to erase itself and to
recite this apparition which erases itself’)” (Woolley 460). Which means that literature targets
the arbitrary connection between signifier and signified, and undermines as well as plays with
fixed rules, images and purposes found concerning language (460). Woolley calls this linguistic
play “a truer realism”, where “the lack of meaning at the center of a text is truer and more
authentic meaning” (461). This plays into the postmodern perception that nothing really has
meaning, at least no fixed meaning since it is only arbitrarily and culturally established and
thus, changeable. This lack of meaning and its arbitrariness, as well the arbitrariness of rules is
in the heart of almost all metafictional occurrences. Thus, as Woolley mentions the definition
of Surfiction in the same-called anthology (1968), “the primary purpose of fiction will be to
unmask its own fictionality” (461). So that means that metafiction is fiction about fiction, it
“focuses as much if not more on its own processes of creation as on a ‘story’ in the usual sense”
(Worthington 114).

However, first, it is to understand fiction. In order to do so, it is essential, as Robert

Scholes (1970) explains, to have notion about life, “both the conditions of being and the order
of fiction partake of a duality which distinguishes existence from essence” (100). It is important
to be aware of a human being’s values and see life as the context it is embedded in. This can
thus be transferred to fiction which hence, is understood, “[t]he ideas of fiction are . . . aspects
of the essence of being human” (101). However, an essence of fiction, as Scholes puts it, is
being original, “it is only by being original that we can establish a harmonious relationship with
the origins of our being” (101). It follows then to understand metafiction. There are four forms
of criticism metafiction is concerned: formal, structural, behavioural and philosophical (105);
while former two are interested in how fiction works, latter target the “conditions of being”
(110). Lost in the Funhouse, so he claims, belongs to the first category, as it is concerned with
the “order of fiction” (110).
 Dudić 3

Adequately, John Barth (1967) himself called his stories “the literature of exhaustion”.
He explains that all other kinds of fiction have already covered all possible ideas and ways to
convey them and thus, nothing new can be created (70). However, in his “literature of exhaus-
tion”, the absence of meaning is the meaning. As Marjorie Worthington (2001) skilfully re-
words it, “fiction should both portray and become - or be performative of - the postmodern
exhaustion he [Barth] discusses” (120). So, showing the exhaustion of traditional narratives is
the new postmodern paradigm, in contrast to the modernist rule to “make it new”. “With the
use of metafiction, it is shown in Lost in the Funhouse that language does not function to rep-
resent the world; it functions to prove that it has nothing to do with reality” (Boşnak and Boşnak
21).

Thus, being “only a playground”, the text leaves both the addresser and addressee end-
lessly and unsuccessfully searching for a “final point” (21) in the story without leading them
anywhere at all but to a state of not-being. Comparably, the character tries and fails to describe
himself by narrating his story, feeling the urge to endure this seemingly hopeless project
(Worthington 115), “The climax of the story must be its protagonist’s discovery of a way to get
through the funhouse. But he has found none, may have ceased to search” (Barth 96).

Considering Woolley’s (1985) reading of Lost in the Funhouse, the character is trying
to find his own voice by going through a number of other voices, “Ambrose full of voices, all
his, none him; or a narrator full of voices, including Ambrose's. Is Ambrose's voice within the
tale, or enclosing it?” (470). Thus, the mirrors in the funhouse reflect two ideas: Firstly, Am-
brose questions his true identity, being confronted with multiple images of himself; secondly,
nobody can see anything completely objectively, but always subjectively from the own point
of view:

You think you’re yourself, but there are other persons in you. Ambrose gets hard when
Ambrose doesn’t want to, and obversely. Ambrose watches them disagree; Ambrose
watches him watch. In the funhouse mirror-room you can’t see yourself go on forever,
because no matter how you stand, your head gets in the way. Even if you had a glass
periscope, the image of your eye would cover up the thing you really wanted to see.
(Barth 85)

Trying to find the exist to the funhouse’s labyrinth and attempting to describe said experience,
the problem of narration is stated “as an existential one” (Woolley 472). We “are trapped in our
own perception” (my translation; Goetsch 294), which, too, is shown in the ongoing change of
 Dudić 4

voice and point of view, since nothing seems right enough to state things as they really are
(294).

In the case of "Life Story," narrative self-consciousness does not lead to the recognition
of the fictionality of life; instead, the narrator's awareness of himself as a self-conscious
being allows him to conclude that he is not, after all, a character in someone else's fic-
tion. However, while the narrator's self-consciousness serves to re-establish his person-
hood or reality by convincing him that he could not possibly be fictional, that same self-
consciousness stands in the way of his successfully completing the story he set out to
write. Once he recognizes that he is not a fictional character in someone else's fiction, it
suddenly becomes impossible for him to write the story about a character who is.
(Worthington 121)

Thus, the story is, in its fictional sense, about a person being lost in a funhouse; however, in its
metafictional and more ostensible sense, it is about the struggles of telling this “’real’ experi-
ence, as the [story] is about the difficulty of the writer whose position in existence is distorted
by his desire to find fictional equivalents for the conditions of being” (Scholes 111). Lost in the
Funhouse contemplates upon this arbitrary and ironic relationship between linguistic expres-
sions and their meaning. It distances said properties leaving the character, narrator and reader
in an incomplete state of alienation (Woolley 467), “he’s been out of the place for ages” (Barth
85). However, “[w]hile it is true that he points out the absence at the heart of language, he gives
us another sort of presence: namely, our resistance to that absence” (Woolley 467-468), which
resonates with the postmodern idea that not the existence of something is essential but the ques-
tioning of its non-existence. So, the text is not only about being self-referential, but also about
the character referring to himself as a being and his dramatic experience of realising the absence
of meaning and fighting against this absence in order to be (465-467). Thus, postmodern self-
reflexivity is about the importance of meaning and the arbitrariness of this importance, decen-
tring our values and therefore creating new ones. More in depth, the story targets the irritating
aspect of the multiplicity of meaning, stating that “in a perfect funhouse you’d be able to go
only one way . . ., getting lost would be impossible” (Barth 85), where the path in the funhouse
resembles one coherent meaning, whose authority is undermined by the diversity and juxtapo-
sition of multiple ones. This leads to the fact that nothing seems right anymore, leaving the
postmodern subject lost in a fragmented world, desperately trying to grasp meaning and not
being able to hold on to anything, “. . . he despised his father too, for not being what he was
supposed to be” (Barth 90) since “[n]othing was what it looked like” (Barth 90) “[a]nd there
wasn’t one thing you could do about it” (Barth 91).
 Dudić 5

In addition to already explained self-reflexivity, Barth lets his story contemplate upon
rules and conventions of fictional writing in multiple ways. Right at the beginning, he targets
the use of italics to emphasize statements by overusing the technique:

For whom is the funhouse fun? Perhaps for lovers. For Ambrose it is a place of fear and
confusion. He has come to the seashore with his family for the holiday, the occasion of
their visit is Independence Day, the most important secular holiday of the United States
of America. (Barth 72)

Thus, the question arouses what is to be considered important enough to be stressed. Bearing
in mind the postmodern notion of the non-existence of meaning and, therefore, its hierarchy,
this excess use in the passage here reflects upon said idea. Moreover, the narrator directly tar-
gets the conventional creation of fictional realities that uses blanks “for reasons of tact or legal
liability” in order to appear more real, being “an illusion” itself (Barth 73). He explains in an
ironic voice how characters are to be developed to seem palpable to the audience. Explaining
the use and effect of metaphors he automatically undermines latter, again shading light to the
arbitrariness of language:

Peter and Ambrose’s father . . . remove[d] the first cigarette from a white pack of Lucky
Strikes, and, more remarkably, light it with a match forefingered from its book that
thumbed against the flint paper without being detached. The matchbook cover merely
advertised U.S. War Bonds and Stamps. 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 . . . even hinting to the reader
things of which the narrator is unaware . . . (Barth 74)

Describing the construction of the story, for example, “The function of the beginning of a story
is to . . .” (Barth 77), the narrator slips off getting lost in the irrelevance of conventional creation
of it, loosing meaning while trying to grasp and record it, stating that “we will never get out of
the funhouse” (Barth 77). Going more into detail and explaining the concept of the Freitag’s
Triangle, that describes the conventionally compulsory need for a story to have an exposition,
climax and dénouement, the narrator again targets this theory by showing its ridiculousness
when he fails to explain in detail why the concept should be applied:

While there is no reason to regard this pattern as an absolute necessity, like many other
conventions it became conventional because great numbers of people over many years
 Dudić 6

learned by trial and error that it was effective; one ought to forsake it . . . because [it]
can better can better effect that effect. (Barth 95)

The story rapidly increases tension, trying to contain more and more meaning and at the same
time being unable to do so and to focus on what really is important and meaningful, exploding
into nothingness, “. . . to conceive the five hundred twelve ancestors of the two hundred fifty-
six ancestors of the et cetera et cetera et cetera . . .” (Barth 80). In this process, the narrator,
and/or Ambrose even loose the certainty of the only perception a human being can be sure of,
namely its personhood, its being, “he deceived himself into supposing he was a person” (Barth
93). Not being sure what is truth and what illusion, “he lost himself in the reflection that the
necessity for an observer makes perfect observation impossible” (Barth 94), playing into the
awareness of the inaccuracy of writing and the impossibility to grasp true meaning.

The twist, of course, is that the storyteller becomes a character within the story, lost in
the funhouse with Ambrose, unable to control or foresee the direction of the tale. Thus
the narrative voice is located on the Moebius strip, where outside becomes inside and
inside becomes outside. In the hall of mirrors, the reflections and refractions go on infi-
nitely, blurring and distorting Ambrose into not Ambrose. As the self-reflexive language
undermines language's referential function, it undermines our sense of the narrator as
person. We have a sense of a mind informing the story, but it is not strictly personal:
Ambrose "deceives himself" and us "into supposing he [is] a person" (LF, p. 90), for he
exists only as self-consciousness assuming a range of voices, some personal and some
conventional. Our sense of narrator-as-person is replaced by narrator-as-voices. (Wool-
ley 470-471)

In this story, the “loss of the subject” (Woolley 464) is in the centre of it, so the loss of a entre
is the centre; nothingness is texture, chaos is structure:

When postmodern criticism claims that the lack of meaning of the "text" is its meaning,
that the lack of referential value to language is its truth, it dissolves two types of tension
essential to narrative: the linguistic tension between reference and self-reference, and
the narrative tension between mimesis and poesis. Self-reflexive fiction certainly does
confront us with the fact that language and convention are merely surfaces. Yet the
complexity of this type of fiction is due in part to the fact that it simultaneously creates
and undermines presences. To turn from the criticism back to the fiction itself is to ex-
perience as readers how self-reflexive narrative constantly cultivates this tension.
(Woolley 463)
 Dudić 7

According to Jacques Derrida (1981), the existence of said absolute truth is impossible, since
language is based on a structure of differences without a centre, where meaning is floating and
attributed not by signs but their differences (278). As soon as new words are invented, the
meaning of the already existing ones is changed. For example, considering the difference be-
tween mean and think: If mean would not exist, think would mean mean, too. Thus, as Derrida
states, every allegedly “’simple term’ is marked by the trace of another term” (33), or as Julia
Kristeva (1982) put it, “Each text consists of a mosaic of quotations; each text is an absorption
and transformation of another text” (“Jeder Text baut sich als Mosaik von Zitaten auf, jeder
Text ist Absorption und Transformation eines anderen Textes”) (my translation; Kristeva n.p.).
This perfectly applies to Lost in the Funhouse, since the text is “decentering and language as
material rather than a teleological end” (Boşnak and Boşnak 22). Therefore, the story absorbs
conventions, norms and grand narratives, transforming them as well as pointing out their lack-
ing accuracy to describe reality. Here, as already explained, the character attempts to describe
said reality and meaning; however, interminably concludes by only showing the differences
between description and reality and the impossibility to reach a final point. He ends up even
questioning his existence, where the question arouses whether existence is the biggest authority,
the only truth, brings authority over non-existence.

Thus, applying this concept, it could be said that the reader, existing in reality, has au-
thority over the narrator, who only exists in various extent in the text, “even hinting to the reader
things of which the narrator is unaware” (Barth 74) and he, Ambrose/the narrator felt “as though
someone else were Master” (84). Here, “the text almost asks to be deconstructed, as it claims
that authority once did but no longer does rest with either the author or the text” (Worthington
117). It suggests, “that it is the reader, not the author, who holds the ultimate power over a
narrative” (Worthington 117). However,

while metafiction in general allows, even demands, a new and more powerful role for
the reader, it simultaneously demonstrates the continuing need for a consciously con-
structing authorial figure. What I mean is: a text that thematizes a self-conscious aware-
ness of the processes of its own construction unavoidably thematizes the importance of
its constructor. (Worthington 118)

So, metafiction requires the reader to contribute to creating the story and its meaning since the
narrator leaves many blanks for them to fill and is seemingly unable to construct the text himself
when he struggles to find the right way to do so. Hence, since the author presents us this appar-
ently lost or “dead” ability of storytelling, Derrida’s “death of the author” in various extent
 Dudić 8

applies to this short story (Worthington 115). Here, it is important to note that not Barth as the
actual author is meant, but the “fictional author”, who tells the story (116), and who, as Scholes
claims, created this text and all its “self-conscious moments” and their effects (115). Therefore,
even the death of the author is created and thus, the text again contradicts itself: It partly states
that no authority is needed, but authority is needed to declare exactly this; the authority of life
does not really exist since everything is constructed, but somebody needs to exist in order to
come to this conclusion.

Self-reflexivity leads to the awareness that language is fiction making, that the self and
the world are fictions. What, then, can self-reflexive fiction speak of authoritatively?
Barth's answer is that it can speak of an existential situation, the dilemma of users of
language. (Woolley 480)

Again, in this text, the absence of meaning is the meaning, “ending up with the conclusion that
interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning” (Boşnak and Boşnak 26), since the story
rather ceaselessly consists of signifiers rather than signs (24).

Even the authority of the funhouse – being the symbol of questioning authority – is
undermined, “[i]n a perfect funhouse you’d be able to go only one way . . ., getting lost would
be impossible” (Barth 85). Marking that “[b]ecause life is a rather badly made funhouse the
artist tries to imagine a better one” (Woolley 472), the narrator considers him to have failed
creating the funhouse, “I’ll never be an author” (Barth 86) which explains the flawed funhouse.
It resembles reality but is a closed universe in itself (Goetsch 295), which again plays into the
question whether the author has ultimate power over the story he constructed. However, as
predominant in this story, the death of the author is prevailing and the readers evolve as new
story makers (Worthington 115).

The argument has often been made that the intricacy of the text, coupled with the appar-
ent failure of the narrator to control and shape the story, forces the reader to construct a
meaning for the text and thereby to participate in the construction of the work itself.
(Worthington 115)

This assumption is supported by the fact that the narrator in Lost in the Funhouse frequently
implies that “traditional narrative forms and the authors who construct them have lost their
power to find or depict a coherent meaning” (115). This happens because, in postmodernism,
meaning “is not fixed but contextual, fleeting, non-existent” (117). Therefore, the reader is es-
sential in the creation of the meaning of a text, that, no longer provides a singular, authoritative
 Dudić 9

meaning - if indeed it ever did” (117). Considering this, it is unquestionably reasonable that a
text has not one, but multiple meanings, since its significance is only then constructed in the
reader’s imagination and interpretation. In this sense, one could speak of the death of the author
when it comes to Lost in the Funhouse. However, and nevertheless, an author is needed to even
construct a text that stimulates the creation of meaning. Texture is needed, even if it means
nothing, in order to generate meaning over something, because “as much as the author needs
the narrative, the narrative simultaneously needs the author” (Worthington 130). Thus, Lost in
the Funhouse not only disbands of the authority of great narratives and the author as having
ultimate power over one ultimate meaning, but “also engages in an attempt to revalidate the
figure of the author as a powerful and conscious constructor of narrative” (Worthington 124).

In conclusion it can be said that in the short story Lost in the Funhouse, the central
character and, disputably, narrator Ambrose reflects upon the creation of a literary text, com-
menting not only on the process of writing, but on the arbitrariness and ridicule of conventional
narration and techniques. The non-existence of meaning is depicted by the unsuccessful attempt
to give an accurate description of the protagonist’s experienced reality, stating that nothing is
what is seems and nothing can be seen objectively. Being confronted with multiple meanings,
embodied by the mirrors of the funhouse, no absolute truth exists, but only interpretations and
variations of it, resembling the different paths of the funhouse. However, not the discovery of
meaning is important, but the awareness of its non-existence, and thus, the constructedness of
both, the funhouse and the world. As constructor or non-constructor of these, the authority of
the narrator and author is questioned in Lost in the Funhouse, by empowering the reader through
metafictional elements in the process of the construction of the story. Nevertheless, a narrator
is needed in order to stimulate said interpretational creation, which again leads not to one “true”
story or meaning, but multiple coexisting ones. Together with the questioned power of the au-
thor, the authority of the funhouse, reality and existence are challenged, as well. Concluding
that everything is constructed, contextual and dependent, and neither truth nor meaning exist,
light is shed to not only the process and variables of construction but also the constructor, and
traditional rules and structures are undermined. The story explodes or rather implodes these
statutes, being a mosaic and bricolage of numerous fragments of stages of the story together
with the analysis of its creation and comments on conventions; sustaining a questioning attitude
that is typical for postmodernism. Nothing is reliable anymore, not even the narrator who is or
is not Ambrose, who is or is not. Therefore, John Barth allows the reader to identify with the
postmodern subject when he skilfully depicts distortion and fragmentation of reality by using
the postmodern techniques of metafictionality, the questioning of authority and the death of the
 Dudić 10

author. Not only his subject is postmodern, reflecting on the absence and randomness of mean-
ing; but his story, as well, both challenging allegedly meaningful narration techniques; and
consisting of fragments, distorting the reader. So, in conclusion it can be said that neither fiction
nor reality is reliable anymore, and we are all Lost in the Funhouse.
 Dudić 11

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