Lost in the Funhouse has a lot of James Joyce in it. Jan Marta, among others, has long recognized the self-referentiality in the two halves of the book as resembling both the Küntstlerroman and Bildungsroman prototypes of Portrait ["John Barth's Portrait of the Artist as a Fiction: Modernism through the Looking-Glass," Canadian Review of Comparative Literature 9, no. 2 (June 1982)]. However, Barth's volume of short stories and Joyce's Dubliners also bear striking resemblances. Like Dubliners, Funhouse is, according to Barth,

a book of short stories: a sequence or series rather than a mere assortment … strung … together on a few echoed and developed themes and … circl[ing] … back upon itself: not to close a simple circuit like that of Joyce's Finnegans Wake, emblematic of Viconian eternal return, but to make a circuit with a twist to it, like a Möbius strip.

When Gabriel Conroy composes the concluding words of Dubliners in "The Dead," he forges a Möbius connection of living and dead by juxtaposing the final Christlike (and hence resurrectable) image of Michael Furey against that of the dying priest in the opening story, "The Sisters." Father Flynn's ideas of the world seemed so lunatic that they "made them think that there was something gone wrong with him." Fat May, who sits outside the funhouse, laughing inexplicably at nothing, complements the image of the priest sitting, laughing inexplicably, in the confessional.

Both books begin with a series of first-person narrations of young people, a series of loosely associated Bildungsroman experiences, later broadened into the personal experiences of increasingly older characters, and finally into a study of institutions, before returning to a writer-centered focus on the death-life cycle. Joyce was not to address openly the process of making self-conscious fiction until Ulysses, but it is a topic that structurally and thematically permeates his Künstlerroman, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a story so self-conscious it might have been written by the Minstrel of "Anonymiad." Our final glimpse of Stephen Dedalus's literary artistry is his diary, committed to posterity amidst a combination of hysterically joyous and despairing platitudes.

The great difference between Funhouse and Joyce's first two volumes of fiction is that Barth's statement of self-conscious intent is openly made, even trumpeted, with all the self-reflexive difficulties of its composition blatantly and painstakingly examined. His narratives always obviously work inward to their own composition rather than outward, like Joyce's, to the description of a world separate from as well as a part of their author, who ultimately pretends to stand by, "indifferent, paring his fingernails," even while we see him in the agony of squeezing a villanelle out of his own humiliations and feelings of sexual impotence.

The concluding diary entries of Portrait recapitulate the introductory overture of sight and sound images filtered through Stephen Dedalus's early childhood perception, which begins the book, implying that he will eventually write the novel of his discovery of the means and subject matter for his narcissistic representation of himself. Barth follows the same idea with an author-character living a fiction of his own devising, a motif that permeates Lost in the Funhouse. All the Portrait activities, like those of the Funhouse stories, are those that Stephen participated in and transformed into the artistic consciousness that narrates the novel. In a sense Portrait and Funhouse both use variations on the protagonist/narrator technique of Gabriel Conroy's conclusion of Dubliners.

As Charles Harris tells us [in his 1983 Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth], Ambrose is really the "narrator/protagonist of Lost in the Funhouse. As is the case with Dubliners, Ambrose appears in three chronological accounts of his youth. His doppelgänger appears in intervening stories, which are projections of events and attitudes in the Ambrose narratives, and, as he becomes distanced in time and more overwhelmed by the problems of composition, we can see him identified with the self-conscious author-narrators of the later stories. Andrea and Magda of the Ambrose stories evolve into ur-heroines for the rest of the fiction, while Peter, Ambrose's brother, becomes an archetypical sibling rival, and the problem of self-identity is transformed into a metaphor for the problems of creating self-conscious fiction. In this last respect, then, Lost in the Funhouse becomes for Barth what Dubliners and Portrait were for Joyce.

The above character transformations, eventually depicted metaphorically in Proteus's identity changes in "Menelaiad," are circumscribed by the Möbius strip, which structurally embodies the "Frame-Tale" and thus the rest of the book. The water messages that Ambrose finds are his fictionalized and metaphorized links to the stories themselves, really about his and the minstrel/surrogate's love affairs and devotion to the sterilities and problems of creating fiction, or funhouses for others, as Ambrose tells us in "Lost in the Funhouse" and reiterates halfway through, in "Title." Following the path of the Möbius strip, the reader returns not once but many times to the beginning, made strange by the reader's facing a direction opposite to the one he did on the previous trip. In the final circle, at least one of the jars set adrift in "Anonymiad" returns in "Night-Sea Journey" as the self-conscious primal progress of the existential sperm, who presumably is to become Ambrose in the next story. By draining, then "humping" the jar before loading it with his manuscript and setting it adrift on the sea, the minstrel/author/self-creator, Ambrose, has committed the ultimate self-reflexivity, in "authoring" himself both as writer and seed-bearer. The doubt-riddled, existential sperm begins his journey through self-narration, passing himself many times, always in angst, in identity and creativity crises, driven by primal forces to a sexual union in which the self is obliterated, singing "Love! Love! Love!" just as the boy in Joyce's "Araby" murmurs "O love!, O love! many times," as they both press onward toward the unknown they are forced to define in some sort of ultimate epiphanic fiction.

Hector Mensch, the husband of Ambrose's mother, in keeping with the notion of self-generation, had such doubts about the boy's parentage that he was driven into an insane asylum, and Andrea, Ambrose's mother, is described as beautiful and sensual, a ripe object for Oedipal affection, and an inspiration for Ambrose's later version of Helen and her relations with the gullible storyteller Menelaus. The story "Ambrose His Mark," while realistic, is narrated from baby Ambrose's point of view by an older Ambrose who refers in passing to events that won't happen for years after the story's present.

The second Ambrose story, "Water-Message," takes place when he is in the fourth grade, and depicts him as a creative if increasingly solitary youngster. The mature third-person narration is free of the self-consciousness of the emerging pubescent narrator of the third story, "Lost in the Funhouse." Thus the chronological maturity of the narrators of the early stories runs contrary to the age of their protagonist, even though narrator and protagonist are ultimately the same. In "Water-Message" Ambrose concocts a wish-fulfillment story of a romantic relationship with Peggy Robbins, whose romantic escapades had earlier been darkly hinted by the older boys accompanying his brother. Ambrose's tale, which makes him the recipient of her favors, immediately precedes his finding a blank message in a bottle, addressed "TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN," and signed merely, "YOURS TRULY." Once Ambrose has seen the message, its blank character invites him to fill in the mystery for himself, to supply the composition, to provide the fun for the fictive lovers rather than to be a lover himself. His life will be in a sense vicarious, and can become any reality his fictive mind can make it. The whole foreshadows the similar epiphany Ambrose extracts from his later funhouse adventure, all confirming the mark of the tale-teller, St. Ambrose, whose name he has inherited. In this naturalistic fiction, or fictive creation-represented-as-truth, Ambrose bears the name and sign of the elocutionist, the storyteller, who is destined to fill in the blanks of his own water message. They will stem in part from his own experience and in part from his libidinous, literary, and romantic projections of the meaning of that existence.

Two other tales interrupt the continuing autobiographical account of Ambrose's childhood: "Autobiography: A Self-Recorded Fiction" and "Petition." Both deal with the problems proposed by Ambrose's discoveries. The first was presented by Barth at guest readings as a tape to which he both intermittently listened and retired from the stage. In it the self represented in fiction stands disembodied: a voice crippled by the vagaries and distortions of its author, conceived from the Author/father's background out of penless expediency. Neither self-fulfilling nor true, nor artistically endowed with the stuff of greatness, it becomes a soul in a sort of media limbo contributing to its own being, presumably suggesting courses for its own activities, but incapable of drawing to its own conclusion—the beginning of Ambrose's problems as a self-conscious writer.

"Petition," Barth's first attempt at the epistolary form, involves a sort of ingenuous, if primitive, Freudian approach to Ambrose's problems with his brother. Imposing Barth himself as a biographical prototype of Ambrose creates a number of problems, especially with chronology. If Ambrose were roughly Barth's own age (his pubescent voice was breaking about 1943–44), the petition, dated April 21, 1931, would have been written by an Ambrose a little less than a year old. Scholars have pointed out the actual visit to the United States of a dignitary reminiscent of Majesty Prajadhipok in 1931, so an older Ambrose would have to do a little research to give historical credence to his Siamese twin conceit. The narrator is mature enough to have envisioned the physical complications of a back-to-front arrangement with regard to defecating, lovemaking, and so on, and used them to his advantage in the letter writer's depiction of himself as practically without smell, and with little potency other than that of the imagination. Certainly such a comparison between brothers—one crude, licentious, and physically self-gratifying, the other deprived of freedom in his brother's shadow, spiritual, introverted, literary, and self-pitying—is a reflection of Ambrose's scarcely repressed feelings in his sibling situation with Peter, the sexual jealousy played out against the hilarious backdrop of the inescapable subservience of the smaller brother's position in life. The dilemma of authorial involvement has, as we will repeatedly see in Barth, its comic side.

Yet in "Petition" the obvious authorial involvement never becomes an open reflexivity; there are no authorial comments on compositions, and the whole piece is written as if the conceit of the twins were a fact of fictive existence. The story thus becomes doubly satiric in the extent to which an author (Ambrose) can be psychologically involved in his story about a narrator (the letter writer) pretending to neutrality, while at the same time the schizophrenic psychology behind the twin's exercise in scrip-totherapy is readily apparent. The anguished creativity of the petitioner is that of the petitioner's creator, Ambrose. Barth playfully leaves open the question of whether Ambrose's angst similarly mirrors his creator's. The story forms a fitting introduction to the fraternal rivalry of the two autobiographical Ambrose stories that surround it, so that we are led to question where self-conscious fiction leaves off and traditional narrative begins.

In most of the criticism of "Lost in the Funhouse," little is made of the naïve character of the authorial intrusions, especially in the first few pages of the story. First, the narration is laced with the eighteenth-century affectation of dates, names, and places composed partially with dashes ("19―," "B―Street" "D―, Maryland," "Magda G―," etc.) as if some delicately prudent sensibility dictated that reality be humanely obscured by the author, whose real reason was to imply verisimilitude through the device. Also in the first few pages we are struck by admonitions about technique that one might easily find in an elementary creative writing text, coupled with other naïve bits of freshman erudition ("as mentioned in the novel The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos …," or, "The Irish author James Joyce, in his unusual novel entitled Ulysses, now available in this country, uses the adjectives snot-green and scrotum tightening to describe the sea"). All of these things point to an early attempt by an adolescent author. Yet "Lost in the Funhouse," youthful and error-filled as it may appear, becomes the most discussed story in the collection, with ultimately emerging meanings about the structure and plot line of the whole book. The narrative remains shrouded in intriguing ambiguity, even if on the surface it appears totally accessible. A blatant self-consciousness is increasingly apparent, as the very writing of the story promotes more and more sophisticated narrative anguish about composition in addition to the emerging Küntslerroman lessons of the situation to Ambrose. The story is about its own compositional maturation as well as Ambrose's personal epiphanies regarding his place in life and the fiction he will write, and, indeed, is writing. Throughout there are sentences broken off as if thoughts were either abandoned or so obvious in their conclusion that they did not have to be written, and interruptions in which the authorial intrusion becomes part of a quote on which it is commenting:

"I warn you, I've never been through it before," he added, laughing easily; "but I reckon we can manage somehow. The important thing to remember, after all, is that it's meant to be a funhouse; that is a place of amusement. If people really get lost or injured or too badly frightened in it, their owner'd go out of business. There'd even be law suits. No character in a work of fiction can make a speech this long without interruption or acknowledgment from the other characters."

Barth's donnée is that Ambrose sees himself as a character in a fiction even as he is participating in "real" acts that in Ambrose's perception become fictional metaphors. Thus, the reader is given a window on Ambrose's creative cogitations even as he translates external action into fiction. Ambrose's story is represented as an artistic recreation of his experiences while they happen, a snapshot in time already distorted by hindsight and distance. Even though Barth seeds the story with first-draft mistakes and out-of-place guidelines to make the creation seem spontaneous, we can only assume that Ambrose had to have written it at a later point in time. The sequence is tantalizingly close to what Ambrose's creative father, Barth, gives us in the development of his own compositional theories through the Ambrose fiction. In his introduction to the Anchor Books edition of Funhouse, Barth tells us that Ambrose's visit to Ocean City, Maryland, had only a rough counterpart in Barth's youth to a visit to Asbury Park. The rest is an Ambrose-like self-conscious embellishment.

Oddly enough, the concluding paragraph of this complex artifice is apparently intended as a traditional revelation of truth for its protagonist and the faithful reader, a cornerstone of fictive bedrock which will explain style, meaning, structure, and the rest:

He wishes he had never entered the funhouse. But he has. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he will construct funhouses for others and be their secret operator—though he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed.

Most critics take this at face value, but with Barth that's dangerous. Certainly the statement is Ambrose talking about himself, trying at his neophyte stage to give a traditionally satisfying conclusion to the story. The Byronesque romantic desperation of the outcast artist represents the same sort of naïveté Stephen Dedalus conveyed in the conclusion of Portrait, when he vowed to forge in the smithy of his soul the uncreated conscience of his race. But many Barth critics have accepted Ambrose's statement of intent as an adequate psychological metaphor for the author's own motivation, in a book in which his intentions regarding fiction are purportedly made clear. I don't think we should be so easily taken in. While Barth explores the range of possibilities and dilemmas of writing fiction in Lost in the Funhouse, and exemplifies them through the fiction of the stories, the last statement of the title story is yet another funhouse artifice—like the thrice repeated "Love!" at the end of "Night-Sea Journey" or "the absurd, unending possibility of love" at the conclusion of "Menelaiad"—rather than a guiding principle through Barth's works. It is merely an imitiation of the satisfactory conclusion so ardently sought in such openly self-searching compositional fictions as "Autobiography," "Echo," and "Title."

The division of the stories into two complementary or mirror segments was pointed out early by Gerald Gillespie, who saw the first seven stories as forming a "preponderantly contemporary, biographical sequence" and the second seven as being a "preponderantly historical and mythical sequence," with "Echo" providing the same introductory function as "Frame-Tale" ["Barth's 'Lost in the Funhouse': Short Story Text in Its Cyclical Context," Studies in Short Fiction 12 (1975)]. The biographical aspect of the first half of the book has certainly not vanished in the latter half, but the compositional struggle obviously attributed to Ambrose in the early section was later represented by other voices. Like literature in general, Lost in the Funhouse begins its own endless repetitive cycle regarding textual composition, and the search for new ways to say old things augments the dilemma of the writer's inextricable involvement with his own personal history. That these two problems are interchangeable is what "Echo" is all about. The names of Narcissus and Echo mean what they say, as their emblematic roles become apparent in relation to self-reflexive fiction: Narcissus concerned with authorial self-portraits in other guises, and Echo with the retelling of others' old stories with artful embellishment. This Barthean revamping of the traditional dilemmas is certainly clever enough, as is the heavily chiasmic style, with splits in sentences causing mirror images in structure as well as verbiage. Thus, the clipped aphoristic tautologies permeating the prose create a bilateral sense that seconds the mirrored images of the problems the two alteregos of the writer encounter.

The problematic wrinkle in the story is Tiresias. We never exactly know what his problems are, whether he is as attracted to Narcissus-like temptations as everyone else, whether his wisdom can be equated with some indistinguishable higher truth that opaquely forms a desired end of literary endeavor, whether his knowledge and experience are really a hindrance or a benefit, and, indeed, whether his story is distinguishable from either Narcissus's or Echo's. Whether Tiresias is some sort of aging, experienced writer who knows the answers but is unable to make good or at least practical use of them, or whether his presence is meant to provide that indispensable ambiguity or doubt, has not, at least in my mind, been successfully addressed in Barth criticism. The problem itself intrigues. Clearly, while both have been exceptional storytellers, Narcissus falls on hard, self-absorbed times, and Echo's endless life of repetition seems equally unattractive, no matter how clever her embellishments. Might not, then, the entire tale be a sort of metaphoric account of that old artist, Tiresias, the only one who sees, understands, and knows all, including its hopelessness?

The next four "stories" are presented in alternating patterns: "Two Meditations" pretends to complete omniscience, as opposed to the confessional self-reflexivity of "Title," while "Glossolalia" embodies the dark prophecies of six seers predicting disaster, and "Life-Story" returns to the self-confession of compositional difficulties by the authorial protagonist. "Two Meditations" and "Glossolalia" share several common stylistic traits in that both are heavily mannered compositions, and both seek to (re)present ancient themes in new and clever ways, as if they were retold by the ingenious Echo. The two meditations are parallel aphorisms, which, except for the conceits of their variant imagery, are clichés hackneyed almost beyond salvation: "the straw that broke the camel's back" and "the Monday morning quarterback." Yet they appear striking and original, worthy of thought and speculation, because of their virtuosity of contextual style. By linking the two descriptions of Armageddon with bodies of water near Buffalo (Niagara Falls and Lake Erie), the first with violent destruction due to mysterious, almost supernatural forces, the second just as inexorable a deterioration due to quiet, voluntary, but lethal pollution, Barth creates a sort of rudimentary unrhymed sonnet in which the second, shorter, part serves as conservationist counterpoint to the first. Instead of varying the rhyme scheme between octet and sextet, Barth employs an almost regular metric cadence of iambs and anapests to "Niagara Falls" and increased alliteration in "Lake Erie." The perennial truths are further rejuvenated by Barth's metaphors, which are varied enough to be described by one critic as "bizarre correspondences," but which might more charitably be regarded as poetic conceits: falling plaster, falling bookshelves, the crumbling lip of Niagara Falls, snowflakes and avalanches, stars exploding, tea taxes and revolution, and the indignity of spouses in the first section; and Oedipus' parricide and incest, Venice slipping into the sea, South American revolution, and the pollution of Lake Erie in the second. The ancient quality of the causes intersects with the immediacy of the present: the plight of Lake Erie, the crumbling lip of the Falls, and so on. While the story is apparently Echo-authored, Tiresian elements abound, especially in the extended blindness references in Oedipus which conclude the second piece. Both contain the wearied wisdom of despair that characterizes all Tiresias's predictions, made by an existential seer continually hounded for the truth of impending doom and futility.

The verbal counterpart to "Two Meditations," "Glossolalia" again links a series of six first-person, nonauthorial narrative messages to a general cliché, "Shit happens," which could easily be Tiresias's theme song. The Echo-oriented verbal ingeniousness here is that all six lamentations have exactly the same metric pattern as the "Lord's Prayer," and really should be sung to the well-known tune to appreciate the blasphemous irony fully. Far from the familiar message of hope, the speakers or storytellers invite investigations of both the form of the message and the complexity of the deceit, which may be as "dismaying" as the unhappy message it brings. Barth's endnote informs us that "anything examined closely enough" is bound to have the same grim result. It begins to look as if Barth's existential despair is more and more associated with the mysterious truth Tiresias shares with him.

The last speaker, the author himself, spells it all out as he links the two intervening attempts at unselfconscious fiction to the reflexive struggles of the author in "Title" and "Life-Story." Tiresias is really the muse: "Ill fortune, constraint and terror, generate guileful art; despair inspires."

Again, as is the case in Dubliners, each successive story carries some seed of a previous one. The reference in "Two Meditations" to the apparently resigned spouse who harbors murder in her insides leads in "Title" to the double entendre of the writer's inability to satisfy the interwined demands of his own creative muse and his domestic life, or to find the right words to produce an adequate aesthetic response to their relationship. The story is again about writing a story, the first-person narrator writing about a third-person narrator who is doing the same thing. The woman is either a character in the frame or in the frame author's story or both. At any rate, she becomes identified with the author's own alter ego, constantly questioning, as the whole is presented as a dialogue between the author and himself, in an attempt to project his own domestic dilemma and that of his culture and literature on the story he writes. His sense of despair is therefore compounded by its redundancy; his story, his life, and his artistic tradition are all unsatisfying, meaningless, and so on, the end never quite written, the closure nonexistent.

"Life-Story" is another attempt of the writer to present a more traditional form of narrative, while at the same time having as its plot the problems of writing such a narrative. Barth repeatedly informs us of the precise time and date as the narrative progresses. The female is identified as the writer's wife, and the date as his birthday. The problem crystallizes into the classic narcissistic dilemma: If the writer is writing about a writer writing about a writer, and so on, does not the infinite reflexivity work in the opposite direction? Is not the writer, even as he writes, little more than a character in his own life's fiction? The problem of seeing our lives as a piece of fiction is one Ambrose has had to deal with from the outset of his biographical pieces, and if he is now the mature Barthean author of the second half of the book, what makes the present story appear more satisfactory than its counterpart, "Title"? Only the reader's appreciation of more traditional verbiage. Even if it is a parody of clichéd style, we can recognize the humor, and be appeased at the domestic tranquility of the surrender to sexual normalcy. "Life-Story" appears as a bridge among the previous three pieces and the brilliant artifices of the last two stories in the collection.

Both chronology and authorial voice remain as constant during the last half of the book as they did in the first (Ambrose) half. Barth gives us, as he has warned, plenty of indication that the author is himself a fictionalized Barth surrogate (even if they have different birthdays) who has just been writing the penultimate selection of "Glossolalia"; who has alternatively wavered between homilies cloaked in realism and the torments of self-revelation regarding the creation of literary artifacts in "Title"; and who now, although bothered that he still thinks himself a fictional character, has managed to effect some sort of truce that will enable him to be inside the last two stories, yet be outside them too. The reconciliation will provide a combination that will raise the issues the author has so desperately reiterated all along, and yet afford him the opportunity to be honestly a part of their resolution. The plan would allow Ambrose to exist independently of Barth and the two storytellers of the last two stories, and yet permit them all to participate as separate, and, at the same time, multiple consubstantial entities. They will all be Menelaus, the minstrel, Ambrose, Ambrose's creation of the writer of "Life-Story," and Barth, a variation on Narcissus, Echo, and Tiresias.

In "Menelaiad," a derivation of The Odyssey and the even older sources that gave us "The Wife of Bath's Tale," the self-effacing, self-pitying, self-reflexive seeker/cuckold narrator assumes the guise of Menelaus, a Narcissus figure who overwrites mythically inspired narrative as a revelation of his own history; that is, the history of his love and search for answers regarding his chosen, Helen—the Magda of the mature fiction of Ambrose grown to full narrative potential. We learn six lines into the story that the narrator is not the voice of Menelaus, but Menelaus himself, or all that is left of him: the tale surviving the subject and teller both. The Echo figure also assumes the role of Menelaus, bound to tell and retell the same story to any passerby, interested or not, and to recapitulate the frame narrative in six layers of stories that the seeker-after-truth, Menelaus, must recount before the answer to his ultimate question, "Why?," is revealed or perhaps falsely revealed to him. The Tiresias figure, seer/portent-reader, who knows the meaning of past and present as well as future, assumes the role of Proteus, the shape-changer from whom the meaning of how to go about learning the ultimate answer to "Why?" must be wrested.

The frame story about why Helen chose the self-proclaimed inferior, Menelaus, over all the other suitors, and why she so persistently refuses to reconsummate their marriage, involves what happened on their wedding night, replayed on their reuniting after Troy. Before the answer is wrested from Helen, the answers to leading questions in similar quests each have to be gotten in turn. The ultimate path to take in order to learn how to deal with Helen is only through the Tiresian Proteus, whose message is twofold: to the direct question of why she chose Menelaus, "Helen chose you without reason because she loves you without cause; embrace her without question and watch your weather change"; and to the indirect question about how to go about the search and the relating of it, Proteus shifts shapes so often, assumes other roles so convincingly, that Menelaus is never even sure, as he hangs on to Proteus's ever-metamorphosing tail, that he himself has not become Proteus, and Proteus him, that everything simple does not appear in another form. If Menelaus is potentially everything, a constant shape-changer himself having merged somehow with Proteus (even their beards intertwine), then he is also nothing, but, as the conclusion states, a nothing that can be related over and over again: his own story, exactly like the sperm created by the minstrel who becomes Ambrose, who becomes his story, who makes the Funhouse masterpiece we are reading. Here at last the disturbingly vague character of "Echo," Tiresias, becomes the mysterious interlocutor as Menelaus incorporates all three principals of "Echo" in his own character.

Barth/Ambrose/Menelaus's tale is typically an ancient one retold in hilarious updated slang and such mocking bawdy revelation that the whole thing centers on sex. Menelaus, as the title indicates, is the multiple protagonist, his love quest the penance, and his acceptance of everything that Helen tells him the key to a paradisiacal life of submissive solitude in her embrace. Parodying The Odyssey, as mentioned previously, the story also has overtones of "The Wife of Bath's Tale." The errant knight is similarly counselled into submission and fulfillment in the form of the love of a beautiful woman once he suspends belief in his own inclinations and sensibilities. That the Wife's tale is a self-serving wish fulfillment of an over-the-hill domineering matron, whose fifth marriage was, in its own embattled way, a magnificently perverse love story, affords a parallel narcissism to complement Menelaus's own. One wonders if the all-wise, shape-changing, loathly lady will ever be content to be as loyal and servile as the Wife cracks her up to be, just as we wonder at the veracity of the alternative chaste Helen yearning in Egypt to be reunited with her husband, who is supposedly chasing a falsely conjured dream. Even the alternative "cloud-Helen" is not an original creation of Barth, any more than its recitation in H.D.'s Helen in Egypt was an original version of the feminist prototype, a tale probably earlier than the traditional patriarchal Homer's.

The key, concluding word, "love," inexplicable but satisfying if not investigated too exhaustively, reminds us of the recent controversy over the Gabler edition of Ulysses, which purports to add the answer to what many critics, including Richard Ellmann, regard as the key question in Joyce's novel: "What is the word known to all men?" That Hans Gabler answered the question with the word "love" set off an international feud among Joyce scholars, whose faith in the efficacy of the word opened new horizons for them, and the skeptics, who called Gabler's editorial procedures into question. The strength of the word, now accepted as an article of faith or disbelief, rivals its biblical counterpart in proclaiming love (charity) to be the greatest of the three natural attributes: "the absurd, unending possibility of love," with which "Menelaiad" ends, involves an act of faith not only on Menelaus's part, but also on the reader's. The reader, like Menelaus, has followed, clinging to the Protean shifts in narrative voice, up and down the labyrinthine dead ends of mirrorhouse discourse, hoping to be let out into the light of understandable truth at the end, the attempt expressing a love of literature and some hope of satisfying the epiphanic quest. We have joined Menelaus in pursuing an answer, an epiphany that will justify our perpetual search, even when we know, as Barth will tell us in Chimera, that the key is in the pursuit itself. William J. Krier expressed it beautifully: "Love between a storylistener and Menelaus, metaphorically comparable to the love which exists between 'Menelaus' and Helen, will make Menelaus real" ["Lost in the Funhouse: 'A Continuing, Strange Love Letter,'" boundary 2 V (1976)].

Barth takes care to indicate that Menelaus's story is probably not the real one—the one we are supposed to believe—when the narrator's methods and facts are continually challenged by his fictive listener, Peisistratus, our critical surrogate in the frame tale of "Menelaiad." He, like us, listens while his master, Telemachus, it is hinted, is off swiving Helen, even as her tale of fidelity/infidelity is being unfolded by her cuckolded/credulous husband. Peisistratus speaks for the reader when he admonishes Menelaus regarding the tale-teller's "mannered rhetoric and … shift in narrative viewpoint." The rewards are real. Like Leopold Bloom, Menelaus invites identification. Both Mensches (what's in a name?), Bloom and Menelaus have projected long lists of their wives' would-be lovers; both are steeped in self-doubt, but go through a debased, comic everyman quest for self-identity in terms of their wives' constancy. Their low comic normality invites a pity and fear that Aristotle would not have predicted from an audience supposed to identify with their betters, the very comic ignobility of both protagonists inviting an identification that traditional nobility could not. Finally, in Barth's story, our search for the truth parallels Menelaus's and brings us closer to the protagonist as companion sojourners, as we, Proteus-like, change forms and identity with Menelaus. Proteus represents the epitome of that which you can't catch hold of and keep, the slippery ambiguity which makes great fiction both a challenge and a pleasure. Like us, as Krier says, "Menelaus discovered the necessity of love for his [our] survival"

In the last story, "Anonymiad," Barth returns by a commodious Vicos of recirculation to the beginning, or rather middle, of his book. The minstrel/anonymous claims, "I begin in the middle—where too I'll end, there being alas to my arrested history as yet no denouement." The story, like Joyce's "The Dead," is a recapitulation of the entire collection. Mirroring the book of which it is a part, "Anonymiad" begins in medias res, but, as with all Möbius strips, beginning, middle, and end are the same. While Joyce's stories begin and end with the dead, Funhouse begins and ends with creation. The minstrel "humps," then fills amphorae with the text of "Anonymiad," the surrogate for all the Funhouse stories, and sends them on their way to his lost Merope to become the fictive sperm of "Night-Sea Journey." The literal sperm of the minstrel (his life experiences) line both the jug and the text that records the events, written on the skin of the nannygoat, Helen, a muse surrogate for Helen of Troy, from whom the literary history of Western civilization springs. The minstrel invokes her inspiration, just as Menelaus founded all of his tales of truth-seeking on his worship of her enigmatic favor. In a deed reminiscent of Yeat's painter whose brush consumes his dreams, Helen, the nannygoat-muse, is murdered after a long period of fruitless attempts by the minstrel to catch her prompts his near indifference to his task. The muse is finally sacrificed to provide the means of composition. In the last stages only the drive to write remains, and the story, presumably the "Anonymiad" itself, becomes as much a tale of what the story and concomitantly its parallel text, Lost in the Funhouse, will be as it is the Küntslerroman of the aspiring writer, Ambrose/minstrel. It is the tale of composing a tale; at the same time it preserves a traditional integrity as a love story. Either the story, as the artifice of the writer, will sail away, or the minstrel, who has taught himself to swim, will become the sperm paddling his way upstream on the way to Merope's egg. In the Funhouse context, writer and story have become interchangeable.

The amphora bearing the minstrel's last text is called Calliope, the name not only of the muse who presides over Greek poetry, but also of the Funhouse in the title story. The book folds back in on itself like the strip constantly recreating echoes of previous Funhouse stories, just as they in turn are founded on echoes of stories told from time immemorial. Parallels to such events as Ambrose's discovery of the "Water-Message" in the minstrel's discovery of a previously launched amphora that washed up on the beach provide empirical examples of the recapitulatory motif, while the continuing self-reflexivity of the minstrel's compositional difficulties, his subject matter and the problem of novel recreation, as well as the relationship of words and ideas among author, text, and reader, are all restatements of the philosophical and compositional problems inherent and explicit in the earlier stories.

"Anonymiad" is the ultimate creation of Ambrose and all his surrogate storytellers throughout the book. It is a remarkably ingenious narrative depicting the difficulty of writing such a narrative, one containing recognizable "real world" events and motivations, coupled with a philosophy of despair tempered by hope and love and related in the all-important words that create, modify, obfuscate, and deny even as they affirm the hope that produces them. Ambrose and his creator have matured through a long self-referential cycle, which is about to renew itself once more in the funhouses that follow.