Critical Response Archive: Lost in the Funhouse

Most of the stories in John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse add an entirely new dimension to storytelling, removing both reader and author from the action while simultaneously placing them right in the midst of the storytelling process. For instance, the first story, “Frame Tale,” a Möbius strip of sorts, presents a recurring theme in the series (as Barth calls the book in the Author’s Note), that there is in fact no end. Another theme that links the stories together is the exposure of the actual construction of the story, with few trappings of illusion.



In the Author’s Note given at the opening of the book, he lists the different ways in which the various stories can be enjoyed, not just in print, but also in live and recorded voice. Several of the stories recommended for audio recordings, such as “Glossolalia” and “Echo” have a strong narrative voice that recalls the oral traditions of myths and folk tales: an element that is also present in Robert Coover’s work. But while the stories of Lost in the Funhouse contain a lot of the marks of postmodern work that I’ve come to identify as such, all address the process of telling of the story. Barth removes himself from it by inserting a version of himself (the “author”) into the story, using the same characters for several stories, and revisits the same story—recollecting the Iliad—twice, with two different perspectives: one from one of the epic’s major players, and the other on a lowly minstrel attempting to tell a version of the tale. Even the more “traditional” stories in the series, like “Ambrose His Mark” and “Water-Message,” have some unconventional traits that can classify them as postmodern: in addition to a possible connection between the stories, as the same names for the same characters and a similar setting are set up, both blur the distinction between true and untrue (either exaggerated or fantasized) events taking place in the story.

Each story also begins and ends by addressing itself, or whatever the narrator is speaking of, echoing the initial Mobius strip story in the beginning. Even in third person, the narrator, i.e. the “author”—or perhaps Barth himself—is a strong presence in the story, never invisible, as in traditional fiction. “Lost in the Funhouse” most prominently features these qualities, as Barth steps out of the narrative to examine narrative structure, wax philosophic, and create a fantasy within the narrative. Like a funhouse, the stories weave in and out from existing purely within the reality constructed in that story, to acknowledging and analyzing its construction, or else the construction of a reality within that reality. “Menelaiad” presents this concept visually, with quotations within quotations, as the narrator tells a story about telling a story about telling a story recalling possibly exaggerated actions of his past adventures. Similarly, “Life-Story” is a multi-layered narrative in which a writer is trying to tell the story of a writer who feels like he is but a character in a story and writing a story about a writer who feels like he is but a character in a story, etc., though one can get lost within the multiple dimensions of the narrative. The title Lost in the Funhouse applies not just to the short story that bears the name, but also the entire series, with their labyrinthine and multilayered structure.

Critical Response Archive: Breakfast Of Champions

Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s first novel after a lengthy slump following one of his more famous novels, Slaughterhouse Five, definitely comes off as somewhat scatterbrained, yet it is more cohesive than some other novels I have read, like Naked Lunch. Breakfast of Champions blends all of the elements of postmodernism together, combining the critique of highbrow literary criticism and tangential self-indulgence of Pale Fire’s narrative and narrator with the obscene absurdity of Naked Lunch, meanwhile adding social commentary, philosophical musings, and self-self-referencing to the postmodern mix. The result is a marriage of highbrow and lowbrow culture, a trademark of many of the postmodern novels that followed. And once again the depressing prose is spiced with satire, easing the pain of swallowing the determinist analysis on our doomed reality. Upon further research behind the writing of Breakfast of Champions, I found that Kilgore Trout and other characters in the novel also appear in Vonnegut’s other novels. I wish now to read some of Vonnegut’s other work in my own spare time so that I can see how Breakfast of Champions fits into his multiverse.

Vonnegut has also blurred the concept of reality within the story, though with references to himself and the real world, he seems to be questioning the reality of our own world, in which he and the reader exist, as well. Vonnegut doesn’t just critique the nature of a story and its construction, but also the construction of the reality in which we live. Reality in Breakfast of Champions is distorted twofold, since Vonnegut wrote the story as an author of his own creation. His “author” presents and makes observations of the world around him (which rather closely resembles our own) in ways that the intended audience had probably never thought of before, like viewing the European explorers as “sea pirates.” Every now and then there are points at which the “author,” Philboyd Stodge, admits to taking some elements of his own life and putting them into the novel, and it’s clear from the preface (and knowing of Vonnegut’s creative process in writing this novel) that parts of Vonnegut’s own life and self are a part of the novel, as well.

Breakfast of Champions, while befuddling and thought-provoking in its own right, is more accessible than the lofty prose of Pale Fire, the disconnectedness of Naked Lunch, and the experimentalism of Pricksongs and Descants. Though this is the only Vonnegut that I’ve read, I think I can gather that he was one of the first mass-postmodern writers, who—while he did include themes that were relevant to avid readers and writers—he also spoke to the “common” reader. He questions both the nature of literature and reality itself.