39 pages • 1 hour read
John BarthLost in the Funhouse
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1968A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
“Frame-Tale”-“Ambrose His Mark”Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Story Summary: “Frame-Tale”
“Frame-Tale” is a two-page story that defies story in any traditional sense, announcing Lost In the Funhouseas a postmodern book. There are no paragraphs. The title is in capital letters set in the geographic middle of the page. In much larger text along the right margin, and in capital letters, Barth writes, “ONCE UPON A TIME THERE” (1) from the bottom to the top of the page. A column of dots brackets the words to the left. Like geometric points on a rectangle, AB frames the words at the bottom of the page, CD frames the upper margin.
Below the title, using enjambment, the story instructs the reader to: “Cut on dotted line. / Twist end once and fasten AB to ab, CD to cd” (1). Continued on the following page, large capital letters running up the left margin read: “WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN” (2). Bracketed by a column of dots to the left, like on the previous page, the letters ab and cd frame the words at the page bottom and top, respectively, like geometric reference points describing a rectangle. A reader who chooses to follow the story’s directions and twist the page creates a Möbius strip, a one-sided surface that creates a continuous loop.
It’s important to ask why Barth does this. “Frame-Tale” demands reader participation, launching the reader into a world where exactly what constitutes a story is in question. It signals that this is a new kind of story, as far as the author believes, and frames Lost In the Funhousewithin that context.
Story Summary: “Night-Sea Journey”
“Night-sea Journey” is a lyrical, comical account narrated by a spermatozoon and concerns fertilization. It reads like a narrator’s philosophical interrogations that present a swimmer’s night-sea journey as a metaphor for life.
Self-reflective, it explores whether reality and destiny are self-engendered illusions, or the result of anunknowing creator. This story begins with solipsistic sentiment. The spermatozoon declares: “It’s myself I address; to whom I rehearse as a stranger to our condition and history” (3). The narrator wonders: “Is the journey my invention? […] Do I myself exist, or is this a dream?” (3). He recalls joyful days of youth and recalls surviving despite many suicides, millions dead. The narrator is talking about life, or spermatozoon’s racing towards conception, or people failing, to achieve what exactly is never revealed.
A central nerve here is the paradox presented by the absurdity of swimming an unknown distance for unclear reasons towards an unknown shore to avoid drowning. The narrator mocks his friends’ lofty vision in these ideas, but later cherishes it. An example of structural metaphor, the story occurs in the narrator’s head, and raises questions of life’s purpose and proposes ambiguity. Closing paragraphs—in postmodern fashion—address the reader, suggesting the narrator may one day speak through the reader.
Early, the narrator relates the theories of his friend, who is among the drowned: “but what if the Shore exists in the fancies of us swimmers merely, who dream it to account for the dreadful fact that we swim” (5); “I recollect his maddest notion: that our destination (which existed, mind, in but one night-sea out of hundreds of thousands) was no Shore, as commonly conceived, but a mysterious being” (9). His friend mocks common reasons, like love, for taking up the journey. The friend suggests the swimmer is “the Hero destined to complete the night-sea journey and be one with Her” (10). Yet “he could not say how he knew or why he bothered to tell us […] what would happen after She and Hero, Shore and Swimmer, ‘merged identities’” (10).
The story continues as the narrator explores immortality:
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 (8).
In the end, the narrator says his friends’ vision was one of conviction and love: “‘But one of you,’” we’re told “‘may be the Hero destined to complete the night-sea journey, and be one with her. Chances are you won’t make it’” (10).
Story Summary: “Ambrose His Mark”
This story chronicles how a boy named Ambrose got his name the last Sunday in June 1929, when a swarm of bees attacks his mother, Andrea, as she nurses him in the backyard hammock. Ambrose says the “port-wine stain near my eye” he’s born with “was a devil’s mark” (18). This physical characteristic becomes a narrative launching point, enabling Barth to explore the concept of fateand hint at transforming the idea of one’s own identity into epic, while poking fun at Greek mythology.
Set in East Dorset, the narrative launches from the perspective of a precocious baby, recalling his first months alive before being named. Aunt Rosa and Andrea call him Honig, German for “honey.” Uncle Konrad tells how American Indians waited “for the right sign to tell them what to call him” (15). Barthes loads on imagery concerning the baby’s love of nursing. Mother “invited me to drink the sweet pap” (15).
The story soon veers into the past, raising a question of the narrator’s reliability. Ambrose recalls “all that winter, as I grew in Mother’s womb, Grandfather fretted with his scheme” (17) to attract bees to produce honey. It is 1929, “the stock market had fallen, the tomato-canners were on strike, hard times were upon the nation” (17). Grandfather gets the craving to make honey wine, like when he imported yeast and grapestock from Germany. Enter neighbor Willy Erdmann, whose three healthy hives rest just across the alley. We learn that Andrea nurses her baby in the backyard, while she smokes and drinks; Erdmann possibly peeks from his second-floor window. Until the fateful Sunday Andrea is nursing on the hammock, and “her screams brought Grandfather from the porch; he saw the cloud of bees […] and Willy Erdmann burst like a savage through our hollyhocks […] in one hand he brandished a shotgun” (22). Here the story’s central conflict explodes and the characters swarm.
Barth leaves out what causes the swarm, exploiting this information gap. In preceding pages, Grandfather and Erdmann take steps to attract more bees to their hives. Erdmann uses a bee-bob, which he strikes Grandfather with during the swarm. There’s little concern for Andrea. Aunt Rosa rescues Ambrose and runs with him and his older brother to a church. Grandfather fetches a garden hose, but Erdmann shoots his gun into the air, sending the bees sprawling, as both men collect handfuls of bees for their hives. Andrea runs away, closing her kimono, and one bee stings her breast. The story concludes with the characters trying to figure out what caused the swarm, while discussing how the day’s events seemed like fate, due to Ambrose’s birthmark. It’s similar to a story about Plato—a swarm of bees bit his mouth when he was a kid, according to Konrad. They search for a metaphor. The same thing happened to Saint Ambrose. The narrator tells us that’s how Ambrose got his name, years after his birth.
“Frame-Tale”-“Ambrose His Mark” Analysis
The first three stories in Lost in the Funhouse present three postmodern narratives that stray from traditional storytelling narrative modes and explore the line between the personal and epic, as Barth attempts to incorporate the reader into the story’s telling, breaking down the barrier between writer and reader. These metafictional techniques are paramount in Barth’s work, which often explore the reality of the self in a world filled with stories. In that way Barth’s theme of the personal epic and anti-hero motif begin to surface. “Frame-Tale” is a story asking the reader to turn the page into a Möbius strip. “Night-sea Journey” is narrated by a spermatozoon. In “Ambrose His Mark” Barth wants the reader to believe we can precisely access and narrate moments experienced in the womb. All three stories require reader participation, concentration, and intellectual flexibility.
In “Frame-Tale” Barth calls into question what makes a story. As the first story, it announces the author’s intentions. It signals this is, in the author’s eyes, a new type of literature. Barth believed traditionalist realist narrative strategies had been used up. “Frame-Tale” demonstrates his attempt to set out in a new direction.
Postmodernism is often concerned with experiencing the world in new language. Echoing Hamlet’s to be or not be, in “Night-sea Journey,” Barth suggests a new way of asking old questions. His decision to not explicitly state who or what the narrator is demands a reader, or one who is willing, to ask: who is the narrator. It’s this type of self-reflexive move that draws the writer and reader into a new relationship that demonstrates Barth’s postmodernist technique.
In “Ambrose His Mark,” Barth exploits reader’s confusion about what causes the Sunday swarm of bees. This withholding propels the reader—eager for information—forward. The technique also suggests Barth’s priorities are not in delivering a traditional account of what happened. Rather, he’s interested in causes and forces beneath the surface that shape any event and give it definition. Also at play in this story is Barth’s placing the individual within a mythic context, alluding to Native American, Austrian and Swiss legend, as well as stories of Plato and Saint Ambrose. For Barth, the story is never just a story.
