Literary Analysis Of Lost In The Funhouse By John Contoh

In John Barth’s short story “Lost in the Funhouse” John Barth took the audience through the story of Ambrose, his friend Magda, and his family as they drove on a road trip to go to a carnival with a funhouse in it. Throughout most of the story they rode in the car excited to get to Ocean City’s carnival with the funhouse but when they eventually got there Ambrose was not all that happy to have gotten there and he wished he had never went on the journey to get there. The story being told by Barth was really not about the story itself, once it was broken down and looked deeper into it, it was the author taking the audience through the process of what authors go through writing a story. Barth wrote his short story using older literary techniques,

This explains why Barth wrote his story like he did, writing using an older literary technique and then justifying what he did by explaining what he did for the readers. “For Ambrose it is a place of fear and confusion” Then he goes on to say he used “italic type” as an “oral emphasis of words and phrases” (Barth, 69). He also goes on to make fun of the literary techniques he has used in his own writing, “it is an illusion that is being enhanced, by purely artificial means” (Barth, 69). This expresses how he feels that his work that he is doing and has been working on for quite awhile is a joke, which again explains the end where he wishes he had never gone into the funhouse in the first place. “Metafiction focuses as much if not more on its own processes of creation” (Worthington, 2001), which explains why the author very often jumped into his piece of work as himself to add his voice and to explain how he created his paper with the techniques he

“A funhouse has mirrors all around…His own head is also in the way of ever directly seeing the image in the mirror behind him...Barth’s way of saying that literature can never directly make it to the reader” (Matt, 2009). The idea that the reader can not get the message of a story while reading it gives a reason to why Barth wrote his short story like he did with all of his pauses throughout to insert his own self and explain what it was he used in his writing. He knew that the reader would not understand why this short story was written, so while he was writing this story he decided he would add his own explanations as to what he used and why he used those things, even if it was to make fun of the techniques he used. He also wrote in his own little comments in his short story in an “attempt to sort out the maze of self-conception and to determine the effects that too much self-knowledge has on the individual” (Todd, 151). John Barth is trying to break down the story for the audience as he is writing his short story in hopes of people actually getting something useful out of what he wrote. This is the job of a formalism crit and so in a way he wrote a criticism within his piece of