[Tharpe was an American critic and educator. In the excerpt below, he offers a stylistic and thematic analysis of Lost in the Funhouse.]

Despite its disconcerting form and its content, Lost in the Funhouse generally presents the pattern of the life of the traditional hero. Barth's acknowledged reading of [Joseph] Campbell only helped to crystallize what was forming in his mind in great part as a result of what was occurring in Western culture. As archaeologists and others, such as Lord Raglan and Otto Rank, wrote syntheses of their discoveries about the old myths, novelists of various sorts were dealing with heroism. Joyce may have inspired Barth to his treatment of the artist as a young man, but Western culture was generally interested in defining heroism.

Lost in the Funhouse is a portrait of the artist as hero. The themes are art and love, and the fusion of formula and content promulgates a metaphysics as well as an aesthetics. Though Barth is master of language, he appears to find the mystery of language overpowering. Words accomplish so much that they ought to compose a holy word. Yet something appears to be lacking. Craftsmanship and creativity in perfect union are insufficient to produce the final holy utterance. The result is that something is always left to be said, and everything is to be said all over again. Thus, one seeks for sense in nonsense, as in "Glossolalia"…. Lost in the Funhouse is an attempt to see whether the medium can possibly serve as the message.

The floating opera becomes the funhouse, with its labyrinths, distorted mirrors, secret passageways, peepholes, loopholes, and general crazy construction—probably with the author's awareness that even a funhouse that is completely disorganized and chaotic had a deviser—a mind that deliberately created chaos. But the funhouse is also the ivory tower of the artist, including the structure of his own works, the method of his narrative technique, and the relationship between the artist and his works, particularly insofar as the works resulted from the artist's need.

When one does form the Möbius strip of Barth's "Frame-Tale," the strip reads continuously in script writ large: "Once upon a time there was a story that began once upon a time…." One begins reading at any point on the strip, and the possible distortion of syntax is unimportant. With the reader's inclination to punctuate and interpret, what he finds will depend on where he begins. And Barth of course articulates the case also of the idiot's sound and fury, telling a story that goes on forever without either end or accomplishment.

The symbol of the Möbius strip allows the numerous distortions of time sequence that occur in the volume. Both Ambrose and the narrator of "Anonymiad" can invent fiction. The strip also symbolizes the idea that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny when someone begins the process of gaining the wisdom of the world over again….

The Möbius strip is also a symbol of the labyrinth of the funhouse from which even the extra possibilities of movement allow only cosmopsis, a realization of limited possibilities, whether one deals with the physical universe, the relativity of time, or the house of fiction. One may attempt technique, for example, without ever really being father to oneself or unmoved first cause or the literal deviser and creator of language. The strip perfectly represents the increase in possibilities that relativity theory has provided, while it at the same time shows limitations of the complex maze. The universe is unbounded but finite. Whatever "unbounded" means, "finite" does not mean infinite. If the mind escapes madness in the awareness of the complex paradoxes, it still must shy from the possibility that beyond the finite is a chaos that is both unbounded and infinite. To escape, one goes on with the story.

The speaker of "Night-Sea Journey" is a sperm cell on its way to fertilize an ovum, and it is the lone survivor of the millions of its fellows spurted through the canal in the one emission. Barth has ironically set a microscopic spark of life to write the whole account of the mystery of existence. The result is a brilliant summation of the history of philosophical speculation about ontology. Beyond this point, the sketch is so clear an exposition that comment on the content is mere detraction. More pertinent is the observation that Barth confines the content to speculation within a limited set of known conditions. Whatever the state of the sperm's knowledge, the reader knows that since it speaks it lived and met its destined She. The story is an exposition of Spielman's Law, which "showed the 'sphincter's riddle' and the mystery of the University to be the same. Ontogeny recapitulates cosmogeny—what is it but to say that proctoscopy repeats hagiography?" (Giles Goat-Boy). Among other meanings, Barth may be reversing and punning on Shakespeare's observation that some divinity shapes our ends. But the narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" requests his coming self to be heroic and reject the new love and thus break the continuity of eternal recurrence that Spielman's Law states. Though he protests against the instinct that leads him to accept his union with She, the avatars that follow him all feel the instinct helplessly—even Narcissus, who uses the concept of the Möbius strip to turn the instinct upon himself.

The ontogenic articulator must receive a name, a ritual that occurs in "Ambrose His Mark." Naming also refers to the knack for calling things by their names, which requires recognition of them. This ability is that of the man of knowledge and especially of the poet. But while others christen babies in the church service, Ambrose derives a name from a secular incident occurring in a black magic ceremony that takes place during the church ceremony. He gets a saint's name in a Protestant community.

Linguistic motifs link the stories and the stages of the youth's development. The phrase "vessel and contents" of "Night-Sea Journey" suggests the idea of form and content, while also being a sexual metaphor. It also suggests the bottle that Ambrose finds and the jugs of wine that "inspired" the writer of "Anonymiad." The narrator of "Night-Sea Journey" is also "tale-bearer of a generation," that of his immediate companions who perish in their vessel….

[Likewise] Andrea's breast in "Ambrose His Mark" ironically anticipates Helen's test of "Anonymiad" and those of the Muses, jugs from which the writer drinks and whose mouths he uses for his Oedipal complexities…. The blank replacing Ambrose's last name [similarly] anticipates "Title," which also deals with a blank and a name. Ambrose is designed to deal with the spoken, honied word; and he will do so in the "Autobiography" of which his tale of naming is a part.

"Autobiography" shows the child lost in the funhouse of linguistic ambiguity where words express vague intuitions of creativity of both life and story, sex and sublimation. Ambrose of "Water-Message" is lost in the funhouse of adolescence. He is particularly caught between fact and fancy, as he begins to mature. He intuits the knowledge that major secrets exist but does not know the extent of his ignorance. He already prefers fancy, both because he is an imaginative adolescent and because he is a fledgling artist with honied tongue, though the bees that gave him articulation also gave him a complex about bees.

The wealth of facts is in The Cyclopedia of Facts, as also in the Book of Knowledge of "Ambrose His Mark," the story in which Uncle Konrad persistently gives information. Facts About Your Diet tells of the physical organism. But even Nature's Secrets, ironically, fails to provide Ambrose with the knowledge he begins to want about both his own nature and the nature of sex.

One of the results is escape to fantasy. The story is a version of the collection of tales, wherein the stream of consciousness that is Ambrose's narrative at the first level includes the series of stories that he imagines. Ambrose is an avatar of the inventor of fiction. His mark is the phylogenic curse, referring to the ambiguity of states and kinds of knowledge. He begins to know of art and love. Thus, he begins to know of knowledge and consequently begins to lose his innocence, like Todd and Ebenezer [protagonists of The Floating Opera and The Sot-Weed Factor]. At the end of the story, Ambrose discovers a fact about the composition of paper, a bit of wisdom about the nature of secrets and an intuition of more to come. He has begun to feel the wide knowledge of ignorance that his progenitor of "Night-Sea Journey" had. Some of his knowledge came from the sea in a bottle from anonymous, the original goat's hide having turned to paper made of wood.

"Lost in the Funhouse" is a record of awareness. It has two main, disparate, connected themes, art and love. But the point is the point that Barth finds inescapable—awareness of awareness, self-consciousness about roles. The artist-hero who is lost in the funhouse is thoroughly aware of what he does. He knows he is lost. He knows he is in a funhouse with deliberately constructed deception; but he also knows that it is a funhouse. He knows everything that it is possible to know. He knows that he perceives the situation, conceives of the situation, creates the situation, and re-creates the situation in writing an account of it. And, finally, he is aware of his control over some aspects of the account. He may not know the ultimate source of his material, but he can observe himself forming his material. He can observe himself lost, aware of being lost, and aware of the deliberate attempt to discover himself.

He is also aware that, despite all his awareness, he really is lost in something he calls a funhouse. It obviously operates on a principle. Deliberate chaos requires as strict a rationale as any rationalism. But also the operator who appears through the crack is asleep or oblivious. One counts on him for nothing except an absurd floating opera. It is all quite a whirl. Barth should have put his funhouse on a roller coaster, though the distorting mirrors and the uneven floor serve nearly the same purpose.

"Lost in the Funhouse" also deals with the themes of art and love; and if the end is trustworthy, Ambrose, the sensitive youth, chooses to tell stories instead of making love, as Ebenezer also does. The choice is forced on him by his awareness that a choice exists. Peter, interested only in earthly paradise, does not know of the choice. Peter is comparable to the gross twin of "Petition" and is the Peter of "Water-Message," whose name is quite likely a sexual pun; or possibly he is really Ambrose's incarnation of a fantasy about his sexual being.

The funhouse is everything. The term refers to the universe, ramshackle and run-down, fragments of illusions and bad dreams of days past. But the funhouse is also both palace of art and palace of pleasure. One reference is to the tunnel of love of Magda's anatomy, incarnation of the She of "Night-Sea Journey." Ambrose feels the curse of the narrator of that story, who gave him a heritage of urge against the instinctive. Thus, Ambrose is like the twins of "Petition," instinctively ambivalent. His instinct is phylogenically to the tunnel of love and the funhouse, while he also instinctively seeks to prevent that instinct from operating, in consonance with the appeal made by the sperm of "Night-Sea Journey" from which he came. All the dark places are symbols of the cave—the jungle, the hut, the funhouse passageway, the space under the boardwalk. The "little slap slap of thigh on ham" appears to be the only explanation of the principle on which the funhouse operates, as Todd and Jake [protagonists of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road] recognize in their observations on coitus. Possibly even the artist's work is the result of that principle's operation.

"Echo" is also a presentation of an epistemology, even a metaphysics, in parable form. The artistic process is at such a point of importance that the real subject finally is how art works—aesthetic that is a metaphysic. Knowing the shortcomings of language, being obsessed with the need to be accurate, and having a desperately keen awareness of the impossibility of being accurate, one employs elaborate metaphor that turns language back upon itself and makes it work in reverse or like a Möbius strip, or like an unbounded universe that derives its limitlessness from turning back upon itself like a doughnut. The parable is the metaphor, a statement of the case, aesthetic or metaphysical, in a language that deliberately substitutes words for the words that might apply. The point is to escape language through the use of language; instead of getting caught in the attempt to find the exact words to state the case, one deliberately chooses other words to state the case. Then one begins over.

The cave of "Echo" has several meanings. As echo chamber within the context of the phylogenic sea-journey, the cave is chamber of endless cycling and repetition, all occurring in the dark. Echo is symbolically an ultimate—a sound without a voice. The sound is somewhat like Fat May's voice, from an unknown source in a funhouse that is all confusion and secrecy. Notes from underground are echoes from a funhouse. Besides, Echo is the voice of silence. She is also the call to art and possibly just the vague call of the gnostic religions. Only Echo has tempted Narcissus "caveward." The cave and the "dark passage" are echoes of the channel of "Night-Sea Journey" and of the tunnel of love in "Lost in the Funhouse," as well as the hut and the jungle of "Water-Message." Ambrose is both Narcissus and Echo. Because Echo is "afflicted with immortality she turns from life and learns to tell stories with such art …"; the words anticipate the choice of art that Ambrose makes at the end of "Lost in the Funhouse."

The motifs here are the rejection of love for art and the concern with finding the self among the possibilities, distortions, avatars. The hint of death may be to Barth's point too: at least unpleasantness is, for at Donacon, Narcissus will discover that self-knowledge is bad news, since "the gift of suicience is a painful present…."

The main significance of "Echo" is that it is placed directly at the midpoint of the volume. Thus, the outer two pieces, both by anonymous narrators, echo into the middle of the volume, deep into the cave, amidst the funhouse wherein they are all lost. Both anonymous narrators are, in their wisdom, types of Tiresias, the knowledgeable one, and of Narcissus, the innocent who stumbles about, muddled, in the real world, or somewhere between two worlds. All three reject love—and after this point, one of the main themes is the conflict between art and love, isolation and involvement, themes which are, however, anticipated in the stories immediately preceding, wherein the sexual impulse is troublesome. Narcissus thus represents early manhood, the point where the youthful artist chooses his mistress. "Anonymiad" with the story of Merope echoes the theme of "Echo," the sublimation of sexual energy to produce art.

"Title" indicates the difficulty "To turn ultimacy against itself to make something new and valid, the essence whereof would be the impossibility of making something new." The title of "Title" probably means that the piece has no title but that its title would go where "Title" is placed on the pages. Thus, the story has no title. The title (lack of title) thus suggests the content, as titles traditionally have: for the story deals with "the blank," and with the blank—the blankness—the end, rather than beginning or middle. The story itself, however, making use of its own theory of using paradox to escape contradictions, comes to an end with a sentence requiring "end" that is left unspoken. When words must go on forever, resolving one paradox into another, even when that end is silence, there is neither "end" nor end—only silence, then one again begins; for, paradoxically, when articulation is so necessary because it drives off despair, there is no possibility of silence. "Glossolalia" tells of silences and miscommunication, but uses words, then a nonsense tongue, which, however, utters; and then "Life-Story" begins. Meanwhile, "Everything leads to nothing," as the narrator says at the beginning of the story, which itself begins at some point "waiting for the end."

Barth probably has tried to divide the bulk of his "Menelaiad" into two equal halves, wherein the seventh level ironically is the largest portion, symbolically comparable to the length of the whole tale. That is, if the universe really does turn back upon itself, the utter ideal would be to have a central inner story that has precisely the same length as the frame tale and all its inner tales. Two infinities would overlap. Inner and outer would be the same. And it seems more than likely that Barth does, in fact, intend his narrative technique here to present and symbolize a metaphysics or at least a cosmology.

In the series of tales, "Menelaiad" occurs at a particular point within a collection of tales roughly designed as the autobiography of the artist; which in turn derives in at least some way from an autobiography of the artist who composes the stories. Farther outside this framework is the narrative "frame tale." Outside this circle is the "author's preface," outside which is the devising author, who is a real man in a real world. In this situation, however, the author conceives of the possibility that he is a fictional person in a real world, or a fictional character in a fictional world that may or may not be of his own making. He may be a series of masks like Todd or a series of moods like Jake and thus never consistently anything, either real or fictional, precisely because recognition of a series of changes prevents exact definition. Consistency is never sufficient for definition ever to be complete. No one could ever say what a man is, and this idea is probably one of those that Menelaus has in mind both when he goes through the narrative levels representing earlier stages of his life; and when, in the central story, he chooses a succession of disguises for the purpose of eventually forcing Proteus to provide the information that makes the return voyage possible. Here is an example of regression to silence or a state of exhausted possibilities.

While "Menelaiad" is about love, "Anonymiad" is about art and the lover of the mistress art. In the interview called "Algebra and Fire," Barth suggests that the narrator is the anonymous inventor of fiction. Anticipating the technique of the ["Dunyazadiad" of Chimera], he is, however, also Barth, who presents various details of his own career. The narrator says, for example, that he "sang a sprightly goat-song, fully expecting that the Queen herself would hear and call for me." His singing did bring him a mistress.

These difficulties with love echo other stories, particularly "Lost in the Funhouse," "Title," and "Life-Story." The "bee-sweet" name of the girl of his dream recalls Merope and the naming of Ambrose as well as the Genie's friend in "Dunyazadiad." The "one tale I knew" recalls "Echo" and its idea that the same tale is told again. The "terror of her love" is what drives Menelaus from Helen. The ironic remark "I'm no Narcissus" means he is willing to share his experience with others. The remark is ironic because of course the narcissist is also the egoist who delights in displaying himself. The decision to combine tragedy and satire is to invent tragicomedy or farce as the most realistic genre. The "wish to elevate maroonment into a minstrel masterpiece" is autobiographical in being a statement of Barth's idea that one's performance derives in great part from his isolation in a universe that he cannot understand. All the narrator's work is a "love letter" deriving from sublimation.

"Anonymiad" contains numerous puns connecting sex and art—production and composition. Other technical flourishes include the typographical display that mixes poetry and fiction. The artist works in poetry but thinks in prose and gradually uses prose for expression. Clio "could hold more wine than any of her sisters without growing tipsy" because history is long and full. The "Headpiece" makes the epic's conventional invocation to the Muse. At least one epic simile occurs: the farmboy. As inventor of fiction, the narrator tells the early fables, "of country mouse and city mouse." Part One-and-One-Half quotes from an unfinished Part One; and to compensate, Part Three is omitted, presumably because the artist had nearly run out of space and so put a tailpiece on to the tail of Part One. Thus, Part One-and-One-Half summarizes the uncomposed Part One. Part Two opens with an opening to Part Two about Part Two. The rest of Part Two combines retelling and recounting Part Three, in a hopeless attempt to "get to where I am." Part Three becomes one of the blanks of "Title" and of the water message, though already existent in Part Two, which Part One-and-One-Half has replaced. Combining the inspirations of Clio and Thalia—history and comedy—and seeing the overloaded amphora sink are humorous references to his own work. The note "anon I forgot it" in reference to his name, is a half-pun. The idea "to give up language altogether and float voiceless in the wash of time" suggests the technique of earlier pieces as well as Barth's logical conclusion about silence, despite which both he and Anonymous write on. Finally, "Anonymiad" is the story of composition of "Anonymiad," and "Wrote it" means the word was spoken down and that the silence came upon him and the waters. The phrase also refers to the epistle of "Night-Sea Journey" and to the blank message that Ambrose found.

"Anonymiad" also echoes many of the themes of other pieces in Lost in the Funhouse. It begins both the poem and the fiction in medias res, as epics conventionally do. "Middle" recalls "Title" and "Life-Story," both of which are being told over again, in the echo that is "Anonymiad," which also is an echo of "Echo," which pre-echoes the accounts of "Title" and "Life-Story." Here the "honey" is Merope, as well as the words of love and song. Merope is an avatar of Thalia of "Petition" as well as Helen of "Menelaiad." The tale also winds on a Möbius strip in and out of illusion and reality. A version of the narrative's origin is interwoven with the narrative that the narrator tells of his past. The minstrel's reply is an ambiguous riddle resembling those of the youthful wit. Ironically, while he gets the position in great part because he sings of love, his art begins to usurp his time for love soon after he arrives at court. The inventor of fiction is a goatherd who sings a goat song of satire and tragedy, rather than a shepherd who sings of Daphnis and Chloe.

"Anonymiad" suggests that the anonymous note of "Water-Message" is a message from the self to the self in some recurrence that leads the artist to conceive of himself as a ubiquitous spirit that utters a message in moving over the face of the waters. Perhaps also, the artist who involves himself with his fiction and finds himself fictional, as he does in "Life-Story," is so dispersed—fragmented—as to be merely anonymous. He is no man, no name. The artist's odyssey is over. He is "first person anonymous," a character in his own fiction. To the question "Who are you?" the perfectly audible echo is "I am nobody." The hint of the answer that Odysseus, another wanderer imprisoned in a cave, gave to the Cyclops is probably intentional.

As exemplification of "Frame-Tale" (Möbius Strip), "Anonymiad" tells of a sea journey just as "Night-Sea Journey" does. The book begins and ends with anonymity, and the ending is as insignificant as the beginning. The book throughout has no character except Ambrose, who vanishes in the labyrinthine funhouse of fiction.

Barth exemplifies his concept of the seamless university in his detailed orchestration of Lost in the Funhouse, as he does in Chimera later. So many linguistic conundrums appear that explication would be far longer than the original, and no discussion of content would be exhaustive.