in John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse”

This article explores, via a postmodern approach, how Barth dealt with the intricate relationship between postmodern fiction and its modern counterpart by constructing a subjective narrative event in his novella, “Lost in the Funhouse”. It examines the transparent and correspondent representation of the narrative event as a category of Barthian critique of modern literary exhaustion, and how Barth appropriates remedial recycling for fictional conventions. This apocalyptic homogeneous narrative device involves a constant reciprocal examination of contemporary fiction and its possible future. It is carried out through mutual subversion and, ultimately, challenges the notion of inherited literary forms and their utilisation over time. As such, the whole narrative event is achieved via a self-reflexive trajectory and multifarious textual solipsism.

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory, 2016

To what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds? More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and the illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text? Metafiction as a self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing attention to its mechanisms and its status as an artifact, while a possible world is a world that is credible, ontologically different from ours only in being non-actualised. Moreover, in metafictions like James Joyce's Ulysses, or John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, deconstructing worlds means not only de-materialising worlds, turning to form in an extremely overt way and moving from mimesis of product to mimesis of process, but also the French deconstruction praxis of denouncing the structuralist dichotomy of the signified and signifier, thus loosing oneself in a network of signifiers which ultimately destroy the metaphysics of the signified. After poststructuralism murders the author, the latter revives as a practical fiction in a textual world of indecidables.

Narrative Success and Failures of Reality: The Intersection of Postmodern Ontology and Literature How can literature provide an insight into reality that would satisfy the demands of an ontology? This guiding question is clearly formed on a presupposition according to which literature is primarily defined in terms of fiction, whereas ontology is viewed as an almost scientific discourse, one practiced by the philosopher, who opposes fiction in so far as fiction itself opposes a transcendent and absolute truth. Postmodernism, in both its philosophical and literary forms, challenges the presuppositions of this question: namely, the tradition of designation in both philosophy and literature becomes blended into itself. The question becomes as follows: how does this "blending" create a continuity between ontology and literature, more specifically, what is the movement of this blending and what kind of claims about reality can we make from it?

Catalyst, 2015

Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research, 2021

While the self-reflexivity of Barth’s short story collection Lost in the Funhouse is largely recognized, locating and defining its key focus has generated wider controversy, with most scholars adopting either a linguistic, metafictional stance, or a philosophical, existentialist one. Taking “Night-Sea Journey” as a case example, this paper aims to conflate both readings of Barth’s tales in order to reveal how both principles co-construct each other, for their concerns (as featured in the book) are not only correlative but inseverable. The study’s structure, mirroring that of the tale, maps the strategies employed to convey its existential preoccupations, as well as the flouting of narrative expectations through which the text’s postmodern playfulness breaks in. In this way, the story’s simultaneous deployment of materiality and transcendence, deep philosophy and light humor, canonical literature and satire, all work toward a comprehensive understanding of the collection’s major theme: the cyclical nature of human history, and the eternal rewriting of our stories against—or despite—exhaustion.

PhD thesis (Central University of Rajasthan), 2018

The second chapter titled “Ontological Discourses in Select Works of Kurt Vonnegut and Thomas Pynchon” discusses how Vonnegut and Pynchon have created fictions which pose questions of ontology, authenticity and reliability about the reality and the world created at each moment in the text. The chapter will analyze how the prodigious events that implode from the ontological being and affect its position as complex product of evolving nature are “dead while alive” (position of Pynchon’s being) and “alive while dead” (position of Vonnegut’s subject). This chapter also discusses how the authors use space which becomes a way in which the “Being” is bereaved to realize “Being”. Geographical expedition implies the discovery of the “other” in Vonnegut’s and Pynchon’s works which they use to create awareness of “otherness” to legitimize the invention of other spaces i.e. Utopian and dystopian spaces, with other people and different forms of organization. The chapter concludes with the realization that after World War II it was agnosticism which gave vent to existentialism, and this is what Vonnegut and Pynchon show by compelling the readers to inquire about and notice complex structures and the ossified notions pertaining to life (living being)

Epiphany, 2015

Lost in the Funhouse is like textbook illustration of Derrida's views on language and writing. The book is both a guide for "how not to write" and "how not to define" writing, thus defying an ultimate center. Although the lack of a "proper" theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it "difficult to read", it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. The author deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. In this respect, Barth operates through the narratives like Derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning.

2015

This paper sets itself the task of approaching the shorter fictions of the postmodernist American writer John Barth. It is intended here to show how in Barth's hands the narrative funhouse has become a narrative prison-house by him meshing together the typologies of fiction and labyrinth. By so doing Barth revisits the Platonic cave to question and to further problematise the time-ridden notions of imitation, mimeses, and representation in his criti-fictional writing that self-consciously lays bare the props of realism's claims to reality and reality's claims to realism. The labyrinthine Barthian writing is shown here as making a heavy use of the scientific metaphor of entropy that, in Barth's canon, indicates the literary exhaustion. Through the onion-folds of myth and the mirrors of his narrative funhouse Barth strives to replenish the traces of meaning long lost in the frames of writing and reality. The fictions to be studied or referred to here are selected texts from the writer's chef-d'oeuvre Lost in the Funhouse.

Lost in the Funhouse is like textbook illustration of Derrida's views on language and writing. The book is both a guide for "how not to write" and "how not to define" writing, thus defying an ultimate center. Although the lack of a "proper" theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it "difficult to read", it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. The author deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. In this respect, Barth operates through the narratives like Derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning.

Postmodern temporality in literature, as it involves non-linear time and narration, creates a discrepancy between the narrated time and the temporal time of narration, and thus the order of events within a story are playfully dealt with. Complexities become more when there is no sense of ending in such stories. John Barth " s " On with the Story' proves a good case in point in reflecting the poetics of postmodernism by manipulating nonlinear progression of time with multidimensional, discrete, and game-like temporality in creating flickering textual constructions, especially when he puts no endings for his stories and avoids closure to mirror the breakdown of traditional narrative values. Accordingly, the present paper tries to highlight Barth " s narrative techniques in foregrounding nonlinearity and open-endedness in his " On with the Story'. As such, the aim of the study is to determine to what degree Barth " s play with time and narration echo postmodern concerns and how is possible to make sense of a postmodern story by investigating into its textual structure than the mere course of events. Barth " s achievement in the postmodern ground in this story, just like his other ones, not only challenges traditional narrativity and temporality but also presents the reader with a new sense of understanding reality as it is happening around us.