Toward the beginning of his confession, the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground writes, "I am firmly convinced not only that a great deal of consciousness, but that any consciousness is a disease." John Barth, among other recent writers who deal with the theme of identity in the tradition of Dostoevsky, takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource—namely, the subject of his fiction. Then, he forces the reader to experience self-consciousness by making him as aware of his role as reader as Barth is of his role as writer. The reader engages in a dialogue with a series of narrators, with reader and narrator consciously dependent upon one another. In challenging himself to sport with, to create a "game" out of this situation, Barth on the one hand educates his reader to confront the problem of self-consciousness, at the same time that he challenges himself to play an exemplary game with such a created reader. Writing innovative fiction of artifice, he attempts to create a reader who, if he appreciates the story first, comes also to enjoy the "good clean fun" of the verbal and technical "circus tricks." Thus, he educates a reader capable of engaging in virtuoso reading.

In spite of the Barth-like Genie's claim in Chimera that the relationship between "teller" and "told" is a "love-relation, not a rape," Barth does not, as might be expected, always woo the reader. At times he even seems disdainful, as though he resents his dependence upon the reader for the existence of tale and teller. Most notably in Lost in the Funhouse, Barth uses extravagant and shocking methods to elicit the reader's response. Although these concerns are present in all of Barth's work, he considers self-consciousness and engages in elaborate sport with the reader most explicitly in "Lost in the Funhouse," "Life-Story," and "Title" in Lost in the Funhouse and in "Dunyazadiad" and "Bellerophoniad" in Chimera.

"Lost in the Funhouse" … contains at least ten versions of Ambrose's adventures in the funhouse. Despite digressions about past trips to Ocean City, factual information, and Ambrose's daydreams, the description of the ride to and from Ocean City provides a "realistic" frame for the multiple versions of what occurs in Ocean City. Inside that frame, however, the plot resembles the ideal plot described in Borges' "The Garden of Forking Paths," one which "had the possibility of continuing indefinitely" because its author never chooses one possibility while eliminating others, but rather "he chooses—simultaneously—all of them." (pp. 42-3)

It is very difficult to ascertain which version of the journey is the "real" one, or even whether or not Ambrose got out of the funhouse. At times the narrator's versions of getting lost in the funhouse merge with Ambrose's fantasies…. Like the narrator, who is self-conscious about his techniques in constructing his story, Ambrose watches himself watching himself choose among the diverging paths in the funhouse…. Merging fantasy and narrative possibility, Barth increases the reader's participation by making him attempt to determine who is speaking. At the same time, of course, he presents the reader with an unsolvable problem. (pp. 43-4)

Even though he does not always call attention to them, Barth provides the reader with blanks like the empty page in Sterne's Tristram Shandy which is to be filled with particular versions of the Widow Wadman. The reader can continue the description with whatever he associates with [the subject]. The narrator's thoughts about technique are also left dangling for the reader to fill in from his knowledge of narrative convention and from the context:

And [the story is] all too long and rambling, as if the author. Assertions of this sort are not effective; the reader may acknowledge the proposition, but. We should be much farther along than we are….

Of course, by leaving blanks at opportune places, the narrator invites criticism. One possible construction—that the story is "rambling, as if the author" were mad and presumptuous enough to believe that his funhouse is fun—is an angry interpolation the author seems to allow if not invite. The reader is further encouraged to vent his spleen by the narrator's own self-conscious interjections which undercut or mock techniques which he has just used or is about to use in the narrative…. The narrator's techniques—the multiple versions of the plot that exist simultaneously, the unfinished sentences, the clever but abusive discussion of technique, as well as the obvious insults—do not prevent our taking an interest in Ambrose, but they do frustrate the reader's attempt to learn more about Ambrose and to become involved in his story. That is, he reads all the technical discussion and manipulation by the narrator because of his interest in Ambrose and his hope that the main expectation "Lost in the Funhouse" sets up, learning what happens to Ambrose, will be fulfilled. It is as though Barth is proving to the reader that despite his choosing Lost in the Funhouse, he is, after all, one of those who prefers "rousing good yarns" and the story of initiation to self-conscious discussion of technique. (pp. 44-5)

In sharp contrast with "Lost in the Funhouse,"… "Autobiography" consists of a voice talking about itself, the irreducible element of narrative. Similarly, in "Title" and in "Life-Story" the narrators try to "skip particulars," meaning both details and words…. Both of the narrators and their companions have no names or other characterizing traits except their similar intellectual concerns. They challenge themselves to find out how many particular words they can omit from their stories while still making sense…. Relationships between lovers …, speakers, and words in sentences are breaking down. Nevertheless, at the same time that the narrator complains that the writer's medium is artificial, without "native appeal" or "first-order reality," but "invented specifically to represent," and argues that "literature's not likely ever to manage abstraction successfully," Barth succeeds in having abstract words arranged in familiar grammatical patterns make sense.

The other implication of Barth's use of abstract rather than particular words is that he is confronting and dramatizing the demise of the word. (pp. 45-6)

The satiric narrator in "Life-Story" mourns that it is no longer possible to write serious realistic literature, "rousing good yarns," with "passion and bravura action in my plot, heroes I can admire, heroines I can love, memorable speeches, colorful accessory characters, poetical language."… Like Ambrose, who dreams of constructing funhouses modelled on but grander than those he knows, this narrator wants to write in the medium and genre which are already "moribund" because they are such. He implies that he wants to write a story that will be like France II, "the grandest sailing vessel ever built,… constructed … not only when but because the age of sail had passed."… Thus, his work would be a kind of anatomy of stories, at once a grand summary statement, making use of all prior techniques, and a tribute to a passing era. As a gesture, its construction is also a protest against change, carried out at a time when change is regarded as inevitable. Building such a sailing vessel (or funhouse or novel) would be a self-conscious exercise, with idea rather than function as its main concern….

The narrator's doubts about his own talent in the face of what he sees as a time of great social upheaval and the task he sets for himself as summarizer of the old and harbinger of the new profoundly affect his characterization of his reader. His desperation makes him bold and somewhat heedless of the reader's feelings. Both in "Title" and "Life-Story," "Barth" the implied author willingly risks alienating the already chary reader in order to convey and evoke the artist's own frustration and terror in the face of the demise of culture and literature. (p. 47)

Tale, teller, and told are confused in the tangle of voices. Despite the fact that he creates first-person artist-narrators who voice concerns similar to his own, Barth also gives the reader signals that his narrators are not to be identified with him in any simple fashion. As he playfully remarked in an interview with Joe David Bellamy in New American Review, Barth prefers using a first-person narrator because any technique can then be said to "only reflect the anachronistic presuppositions of that narrator," and cannot "be charged against the author." Similarly, any of his narrators' excesses, extreme attitudes, extravagant claims, or limitations cannot be attributed to Barth. Thus, he "has it both ways:" he creates personas who rage about the inadequacies of their medium and prophesy the impending doom of story and civilization, while he exploits medium and convention within their narratives. (p. 48)

Throughout Lost in the Funhouse the reader's response, which consists of a mixture of shock, anger, impatience, and delight, is similar to his reaction to the direct address in "Title" and "Life-Story." Flattering and insulting the reader all at once, "Barth," the implied author, invites him to complete or realize the text and holds him off from doing so. Of necessity, at the same time that he is playfully inducing vertigo in himself by parody, wordplay, repetition of motifs and words, and his use of punctuation, Barth is also forcing that state upon the reader. He points out that "Lost in the Funhouse" is a typical story of an adolescent approaching maturity in order to activate the reader's expectations about character and resolution from his prior reading experience only to frustrate the reader by leading him through a verbal funhouse in which Ambrose and the reader get lost. (pp. 49-50)

Insofar as Barth creates a reader who grants the fiction and the author their existence and who affirms the value of the artistic endeavor, technical virtuosity notwithstanding, Barth observes the traditional author-reader relationship. In sporting with the reader, he introduces another element into that relationship. While there is a pedagogic aspect to his destroying the illusion of the fiction within the work itself, his belittling the art of storytelling and of reading is ultimately abusive of both author and reader. It is as though Barth resents his dependence upon the reader and fears his reader's "possessing," completing, and judging the text, a concern that is reflected in one of Barth's major themes. (p. 50)

Just as in his early work Barth's character Jake Horner comments on the inadequacy of the imagination in dealing with experience, in his latest work his narrators continue to undercut the artistic activity within the artwork itself. There is an important addition to Chimera, however. Even though the Genie's appearance in Scheherazade's library may be ironic, it is the Genie's philosophy which informs Chimera. That is, while Bellerophon wanders about complaining of his inability to mold life into art and of his failure to find meaning in the process, the Genie, who is closer to Barth, recognizes the limitations of art and still affirms it:

"Art,… if it could not redeem the barbarities of history or spare us the horrors of living and dying, at least sustained, refreshed, expanded, ennobled, and enriched our spirits along the painful way…. Some fictions, he asserted, were so much more valuable than fact that in rare instances their beauty made them real."

This acceptance enables Barth to conceive of his relationship with the reader in Chimera as a more equal partnership, one in which teller and told both willingly share and participate. (pp. 54-5)