Lost in the Funhouse

“Once upon a time there was a story that began.” 

This one sentence is written in caps horizontally bottom to top along the right margin of pages one and two; the second half of the sentence, beginning with “was,” occurs on page two. In this way we’re introduced to the world of Lost In The Funhouse, in which stories are like a Mobius strip: self-contained worlds that loop around on themselves. 

“Is the journey my invention? Do the night, the sea, exist at all, I ask myself, apart from my experience of them? Do I myself exist, or is this a dream? Sometimes I wonder. And if I am, who am I? The Heritage I supposedly transport? But how can I be both vessel and contents? Such are the questions that beset my intervals of rest.” 

In the opening paragraphs of the book, this quote announces Barth’s self-reflexive narrator, launching the book’s postmodern adventures and establishing the questions the stories Lost In The Funhouse will explore. Right away our narrator wonders whether he invents his journey, and if he himself exists, letting us know this story is one concerned with the inner journey. It signals that there is more to each story than first appears, suggesting the riddles to come.

“Makers and swimmers each generate the other […] any given ‘immortality chain’ could terminate after any number of cycles, so that what was immortal was only the cyclic process of incarnation […] Makers swam and created night-seas and swimmers like ourselves, might be the creation of a larger maker.”

Here, the spermatozoon narrator of “Night-Sea Journey” relates the theory of one of his friends. First, there’s the comical absurd element of giving voice to a spermatozoon. If one can speak, he can surely make friends. As important as the concept of immortality at play here is the idea that the swimmers–spermatozoon’s engaging in their epic night-sea journey towards life–are creations of a larger maker.