39 pages • 1 hour read
Lost in the Funhouse
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Symbols & Motifs
Immortality / Infinity
The motif of immortality, and of a story that extends into infinity, is a motif on constant loop in Lost in the Funhouse. Barth’s continued allusions to Greek mythology, and stories like “Menelaiad,” which give voice to mythic characters, suggest stories written thousands of years ago remain unfinished. The book ends in the voice of a minstrel from the Odyssey imaging his tale afloat “drifting age after age, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire” (193). How can a character who may be an author’s inventionfrom thousands of years ago speak today? Barth suggests the power of literature to raise a voice from the dead, and the ability of this voice to speak across ages.
If various stories, such as “Night-Sea Journey” and “Life-Story,” touch on the motif of immortality, the very structure of some stories represent or symbolize infinity. “Frame-Tale” wants to tell and resemble a story that never ends, a world that loops in on itself; “Lost In The Funhouse” also embodies this concept. Ambrose imagines he gets trapped in the Ocean City boardwalk funhouse for eternity. This is comic, but tragic, too. Meanwhile, in “Echo,” the narrator suggests, “we linger on forever on the autognostic verge–not you and I, but Narcissus, Tiresias, Echo” (100). In “Two Meditations” our narrator informs us: “Until I’d murdered my father and fornicated my mother I wasn’t wise enough to see I was Oedipus” (101). The proximity of the story’s moment and a mythological thinking hints at ideas of immortality.
The Hero and the Anti-hero
Throughout Lost in the Funhouse, as Barth merges the mythical and personal, he satirizes classic hero’s quest narratives, developing an anti-hero motif. This begins right away, with the concept of “Frame-Tale,” and is pushed into epic comedy as a spermatozoon narrates the quest to reach the ovum in “Night-Sea Journey.” In epic language, “Ambrose His Mark” tells the story of how Ambrose, a recurring character, got a birthmark on his eye–“a devil’s mark” (18). These examples point to Barth’s intentions of undermining reader expectations of a traditional hero narrative.
In “Lost In The Funhouse” Ambrose wonders if he’s “a figment of the author’s imagination” (84). What kind of hero would wonder this? A self-conscious one, opposite Odysseus, an anti-hero of sorts. Yet “each saw himself as the hero of the story, when the truth might turn out to be that he’s the villain, or the coward” (87), we’re told of the thirteen-year-old’s insights.
Barth’s heroes commit blunders. In “Menelaiad,” the idea of a heroic journey for love gets undermined. The narrator calls Menelaus a cuckcold and a “fool mortal hugging immortality” (139). Telemachus and Peisistratus tease Menelaus for wandering the seas for years, because of his love for Helen, before returning home.
Although Bart presents anti-hero antagonists, such as the Siamese twins, these characters preserve heroic resonance. Though the minstrel of “Anonymiad” is unsure if his messages and songsever reach anyone, the minstrel still tells his tale, which, in the closing pages of the book, we’re told “drifts away, past Heracles’s pillars, across Oceanus” (193). It leaves us with a note of triumph and heroism.
Honey
Honey appears on numerous occasions in Lost in the Funhouse. Whether referenced, in German, by Ambrose’s Uncle Konrad as honig, or in association with the swarm of bees supposedly responsible for Ambrose’s birthmark–“its three lobes resembled the wings and abdomen of a bee in flight” (29)–this symbol is often associated with the Gods’ pleasure. It seems important that Ambrosia was considered nectar in Greek mythology, and capable of granting immortality. The connection of the delight of the gods and the delight of the bees creating honey is worthy.
In “Ambrose His Mark,” we’re told that in 1929, Uncle Konrad accepts honey in lieu of cash: “The craving got hold of him, he yearned to crush walnuts in the golden wort” (17). Ambrose’s grandfather’s craving to acquire bees for the family hive, leads him–we’re never told but can imply–to acquire some from his neighbor, Erdmann, which leads to bees swarming Ambrose’s mother. We’re told Plato was bit by a bee on the lip as a kid. Honey, and bees, become essential, yet the symbolic meaning remains ambiguous. Barth wants readers to make their own associations between honey, gold, gods and the baby Ambrose.
As the collection evolves, Barth develops the symbol of honey, pushing it through shifts of meaning. In “Water-Message,” Ambrose’s a young boy, but too young to hang all day in the clubhouse–the Jungle–with his older brother Peter and the rest of the Sphinxes. The clubhouse “was in fact a grove of honey locusts, in an area no larger than a schoolyard” (46). Here, we remember the bee’s involvement in Ambrose’s personal legend. But now, the symbol’s framed in the context of a grove of trees. The importance of honey signals the epic tones Barth wants Ambrose’s personal story to convey.
The honey motif waxes towards its full evolution as Lost in the Funhouse closes. In “Menelaiad,” when Helen relates one version of her story, we see images of her led through “golden-Aphrodite’s grove” (159). In “Anonymiad,” the minstrel self-consciously points out the “brilliant trope which he predicts will be as much pirated by later bards as his device of beginning in the middle, compares the scene to a beehive” (174). Here, the minstrel tells how he wanted to join Agamemnon in the Trojan War. How we should interpret the image of bees here in relation Ambrose’s grandfather’s hive, or the bees that swarmed Ambrose’s mother? Are we to think of Ambrose as an immortal messenger? Are we to relate Ambrose to Anonymiad? If realist narrative methods make readers hyperaware of literary symbols, here Barth wants to play with reader expectations, and have readers be okay with the ambiguity he creates.
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