Lost in the Funhouse

Here, schoolboy neighborhood games rise to epic proportions. Now school-aged, Ambrose returns, as we explore Ambrose’ fears of being bullied on the walk home from school. Later, we follow Ambrose’s sandlot gang, the Occult Order of the Sphinx. Early in “Water-Message,” Ambrose hears a bee buzzing at his ear and runs home from school crying. Months later, Ambrose, his brother Peter, and the other Sphinxesdiscover an older teenager boy and girl in their clubhouse—called the Den. By story’s end, Ambrose imagines kissing her. He finds a blank love note in a bottle. The most traditional story so far, the blank note in “Water-Message” carries Barth’s metaphysical torch forward.

This time we meet Ambrose’s friends in East Dorset. If Ambrose is without Peter on the way home, Ambrose fears his classmates’ shenanigans. Ambrose nicknames empty lots he passes Scylla and Charybdis, alluding to a story in The Odyssey that represents a choice between two evils. This evidences Barth’s intention to establish the personal as mythical: Ambrose’s journey home from school becomes mythic. That day, Ambrose tells his mom she raised a sissy. That afternoon, he listens to classical music: “He was Odysseus steering under anvil clouds” (43). Music “bore [Ambrose] transfigured from the hall, beyond East Dorset, aloft to the stars” (44).

Months later, in spring, the Sphinxes head to their Den in the Jungle. Named by Ambrose, the Jungle is “in fact a grove of honey locusts, in an area no larger than a schoolyard, bounded on two of its inland sides by Erdmann’s cornlot and on the third by the East Dorset dump […] made mysterious by rank creepers […] and by a labyrinth of intersecting footpaths” (46). The kids transform their surroundings using imagination and through stories, creating myths. Chancing upon the kissing couple launches more shenanigans. The older Sphinxes meet that day, and too young to join, Ambrose and another brother toss pine sticks, like skipping rocks, into the water at the nearby beach, then throw oyster shells at each other. Ambrose imagines he was the boy kissing Peggy Robbins: “Tenderly together they rehearsed the secrets; long they lingered in the Sphinx’s Den; then he bore her from the jungle, lovingly to the beach, into the water” (50). Finally, Ambrose and the boy find a bottle with a note inside, but water blots the words. Barth leaves us to ponder this image of love.

Written as a letter to the King of Bangkok, in “Petition,” an unnamed narrator who is a Siamese twin and connected belly to rear to his brother, petitions for help finding a doctor to surgically separate them. The narrator’s brother’s marriage to Thalia is driving the narrator insane, threatening his identity. “Petition” can be read as a metaphor for the tension between id (the brother), and ego (the narrator). Another non-traditional story, we don’t learn of the marriage until the story’s final third.

The first two-thirds of the story details the brother’s opposing traits in great detail. The narrator is intelligent and creative, compared to his lusty, grunting front-half. “I; whose imagination encompasses Aristotle, Shakespeare, Bach” (59) is compared to the front-half, who “flies into a rage, shreds his doggerel […] quarrels with his “sweetheart” […] sulks in a corner for days” (59); “I am Anchises to his Aeneas […] I, lifelong victim of his beastliness, he calls the monkey on his back” (58). We learn how different each brother is after Barth spends the first few pages detailing the legend of Chang and Eng, the King’s ancestors, “veritable heavenly twins” (57) “bound heart to heart” (56), who managed “their happy marriage to a pair of sisters” (58). The King helped them.

The narrator believes Thalia permitted his brother “who grunted and salivated upon her night after night” (63) her love because she actually loves the narrator, both his mind and his charm. The narrator believes her love prompts Thalia’s New Year’s Day ultimatum that his brother pull himself together or else. That’s when his brother proposes. The brother thinks of Thalia as “his hope of redemption […] without her he was no better than a beast” (65). Here, Barth digs into the contrasts between the mind’s aesthetics and the body’s less attractive functions, furthering the story’s metaphor of one man’s struggle to unify these contrasting parts of himself.

Meanwhile, the narrator becomes convinced that, like him, there are two Thalias, “not one Thalia joined to another–but a Thalia within” (66). Here, Barth solidifies his metaphor, exploiting the setup of Siamese twins as a stand-in for id and ego, the lusty brother versus the thoughtful narrator. The real goal here is to merge these two parts of the self into one stronger whole: “To be one: paradise! To be two: bliss!” (68). Here, one person’s story contains epic qualities. The letter remains unsigned; Barth toys with the narrator’s identity.