JOHN BARTH

Born: May 27, 1930

Birthplace: Cambridge, Maryland

Other literary forms

The majority of John Barth’s fiction is in the novel form. He has also written critical articles and essays on the nature of fiction and the state of the art. Some of his material has been recorded, since several of his stories require an auditory medium to achieve their original purposes and effects.

Achievements

Honors accorded to John Barth and to his work include a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award in 1965, a Rockefeller Foundation grant for 1965-1966, a National Institute of Arts and Letters grant in 1966, the National Book Award for Chimera (1972) in 1973, and the F. Scott Fitzgerald Award for outstanding achievement in American literature in 1997. In 1974, he was elected to both the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Biography

John Simmons Barth’s first artistic interest was in music, and he studied briefly at the Juilliard School of Music before entering The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, in the fall of 1947. He married Harriette Anne Strickland in January, 1950. In 1951, he received his B.A. in creative writing, and his first child, Christine, was born. Barth completed his M.A. in 1952 and began work on his Ph.D. in the aesthetics of literature. His second child, John, was born in 1952, and with his wife expecting a third child (Daniel, born in 1954), Barth abandoned work on his Ph.D. and took a teaching job at Pennsylvania State University in 1953. In 1965, he left Pennsylvania State to teach at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Divorced from his first wife in 1969, Barth married Shelly Rosenberg on December 27, 1970. Barth was Alumni Centennial Professor of English and Creative Writing at The Johns Hopkins University from 1973 to 1990, when he became professor emeritus.

Analysis

As a leading developer and writer of metafiction, John Barth wrote a body of work that, through the use of the fantastic and the absurd as well as the realistic and the romantic, portrays the human experience in the second half of the twentieth century. He is considered a leading writer in the field of postmodernist fiction.

Barth, who always hoped to bring alive philosophical alternatives in his stories, reviving old themes of literature and life—literature’s because they are life’s—is able to make a progression through these short fictions, retackling the problems, not by repetition but by constantly distilling the possibilities of technique. He has clearly opened the narrative consciousness, the academic ear, and the imagination of readers and writers alike. While he never presumes to answer one of his posed questions, his inventiveness and sincerity make his stories experiences of real substance and of words. Throughout the collection, words and stories help to ease human pain and serve as a source of curious investigation and delight.

Lost in the Funhouse

Although John Barth is best known for his novels, his stories “Night-Sea Journey,” “Lost in the Funhouse,” “Title,” and “Life-Story” from his collection of short fiction Lost in the Funhouse are frequently anthologized. The book is a sequence of related stories that operate in a cycle, beginning with the anonymity of origins and concluding, like the serpent with its tail in its mouth, with the anonymity of a life’s conclusion and the narrator’s exhaustion of his art. Some of Barth’s characters are nameless, having both a personal and a universal dimension. Others, such as those in “Echo” and “Menelaiad,” take their names from mythology. Three stories, “Ambrose His Mark,” “Water Message,” and “Lost in the Funhouse,” reveal three turning points in the life of a developing character, Ambrose: his naming as an infant; his first consciousness of fact, in both conflict and alliance with a romanticized truth; and a larger apprehension of life suffused with his first sexual consciousness. Barth’s characters, or voices, are all natural storytellers compelled to make sense of what they experience; they become living metaphors for states of love, art, and civilization. As they quest, the author joins them, so that Barth’s technique often conforms with his subject matter. Only the first two Ambrose stories could be considered conventional in structure; the remaining stories are fictions that investigate each individual’s experience through voice shift, idea, and the self-evident play of language.

In these stories Barth questions the meaning of love, love in relation to art, and the artist’s and lover’s place within civilization—not merely time-bounded culture, but art’s progress through history, its aspirations, and its failures. Barth’s characters face the revelation that the individual facts of their lives are painful, that self-knowledge hurts and is in conflict with their original visions of the world. The characters turn to storytelling, not only to comprehend the complexities of their personal lives, but also to preserve their sanity as they encounter knowledge. The creation of artifice literally kills time, and by virtue of narrative organization, even when suffering cannot be explained, life may become bearable. In “Life-Story,” which spans only part of a day, the narrator speaks of himself:

Even as she left he reached for the sleeping pills cached conveniently in his writing desk and was restrained from their administration only by his being in the process of completing a sentence. . . . There was always another sentence to worry about.

In “Autobiography,” a story written for monophonic tape, the speaker says, “Being me’s no joke,” and later, “I’m not what either parent or I had in mind.”

The tradition underlying Barth’s stories is the language itself, the very process of storytelling, not merely the genre of story. In this sense his work has much in common with experimental films and some contemporary poetry, as his characters transform their personal worlds of fact into worlds of fiction. For Barth, that is one solution of the fact of existence. The question remains: Does one then become nothing more than one’s story? If the body does not live, does it matter that the words might, even if they can solve nothing? The very playfulness and intrigue of Barth’s language, along with its intellectual complexity, suggests that romantic disillusion may be at least temporarily combated through the vehicle of self-examining narrative. The underlying fear is that the story might exhaust itself, that fiction might become worn out and the words have nowhere to go but back into the narrator’s mind.

“Night-Sea Journey,” which opens the collection, is the story of the life of a single sperm cell as it travels toward the possibility of linkage and conception upon the shores of a mythic Her. The narrator is the sperm and is quoted throughout by the authorial voice, yet the narrator addresses himself and finally the being he may become, not an audience, so the story reads as a first-person interior monologue. Being “spoken inwardly,” “Night-Sea Journey” is similar to later stories in the collection, which are first-person accounts by the author. This similarity effects a parallel between the struggles of the sperm cell and later struggles by the author, which, in turn, parallel the struggles everyone faces in the journey through life.

At first, the narrator shares the determination of the other “swimmers” to “reach the shore” and “transmit the Heritage.” His enthusiasm, however, wanes as he considers the philosophy of a friend, who has since “drowned.” The friend claimed that since their ultimate destiny is to perish, the noble thing to do is to commit suicide. He considered the hero of heroes to be he who reached the shore and refused “Her.” Pondering this and such questions as whether the journey is real or illusory, who or what causes the difficult passage, and whether arrival will mean anything at all, the narrator considers various possible explanations of the meaning, if any, of the journey. Barth parodies philosophical and religious positions familiar to the sophisticated reader. He also parodies common adolescent ramblings about the meaning of life: “Love is how we call our ignorance of what whips us.” The whipping results from the sperm’s tail, causing movement toward an unknown destiny. Barth makes deliberate use of clichés and puns to ease the reader into identification with the narrator’s voice, which speaks phrases the reader undoubtedly has spoken in baffling or despairing moments. The humor is as adolescent as the state of the speaker’s anxieties: “I have seen the best swimmers of my generation go under.”

Constantly suspicious that the journey is meaningless, the speaker is finally swayed to accept his pessimistic friend’s advice: He gives up and ceases to swim. However, his decision has come too late. By continuing to live he has been drawn ever nearer to the “shore” and is pulled by the force of the female element. He reaches “a motionless or hugely gliding sphere” and is about to become a link in another cycle of life and death. Before joining with Her, however, he expresses his “single hope” that he might transmit to the being he is becoming “a private legacy of awful recollection and negative resolve.” The speaker declares: “You to whom, through whom I speak, do what I cannot: terminate this aimless, brutal business! Stop your hearing against her song! Hate Love!” In spite of the speaker’s desire to end all night-sea journeys, all life— “Make no more”—he cannot resist biological fate and plunges “into Her who summons, singing . . . ‘Love! Love! Love!’” This conclusion and Barth’s parody throughout the story of attempts to understand life suggest that the meaning of life may be nothing more than life itself. To borrow a statement from Chimera, “the key to the treasure is the treasure.”

“Lost in the Funhouse” appears midway in the collection. It opens with young Ambrose, perhaps the being formed through the union of the sperm with Her in “Night-Sea Journey,” traveling to Ocean City, Maryland, to celebrate Independence Day. Accompanying him through this eventual initiation are his parents, an uncle, his older brother Peter, and Magda, a thirteen-year-old neighbor who is well developed for her age. Ambrose is “at that awkward age” when his voice and everything else is unpredictable. Magda is the object of his first sexual consciousness, and he experiences the need to do something about it, if only barely to touch her. The story moves from painful innocence and aspects of puppy love to the stunned realization of the pain of self-knowledge. Barth uses printed devices, italics, and dashes to draw attention to the storytelling technique throughout the presentation of conventional material: a sensitive boy’s first encounters with the world, the mysterious “funhouse” of sexuality, illusion, and consciously realized pain.

As the story develops, Barth incorporates comments about the art of fiction into the narrative:

He even permitted the single hair, fold, on the second joint of his thumb to brush the fabric of her skirt. Should she have sat back at that instant, his hand would have been caught under her. Plush upholstery prickles uncomfortably through gabardine slacks in the July sun. The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationship, set the scene for the main action . . . and initiate the first complication or whatever of the “rising action.”

Such moments, when the voice seems to shift outside Ambrose’s consciousness, actually serve to unite the teller with the tale, Barth with his protagonist, and life with art. Among other things, “Lost in the Funhouse” is a portrait of the artist as an adolescent. The developing artist, “Ambrose . . . seemed unable to forget the least detail of his life” and tries to fit everything together. Most of all, he needs to know himself, to experience his inner being, before he will have something to express.

Ambrose develops this knowledge when he becomes lost in the carnival funhouse, which, on one level, represents the mind. Just before emerging from the funhouse, he strays into an old, forgotten part of it and loses his way. Separated from the mainstream—the funhouse representing the world for lovers—he has fantasies of death and suicide, recalling the “negative resolve” of the sperm cell from “Night-Sea Journey.” He also finds himself reliving incidents with Magda in the past and imagining alternative futures. He begins to suffer the experience of illusion and disillusion: “Nothing was what it looked like.” He finds a coin with his name on it and imagines possible lives for himself as an adult.

These experiences lead to a new fantasy: Ambrose dreams of reciting stories in the dark until he dies, while a young girl behind the plyboard panel he leans against takes down his every word but does not speak, for she knows his genius can only bloom in isolation. This fantasy is the artistic parallel to the sperm’s union with “Her” in “Night-Sea Journey.” Barth thus suggests that the artist’s creative force is a product of a rechanneled sexual drive. Although Ambrose “would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed,” he will construct, maybe operate, his own funhouse in the world of art. His identity as an artist derives from the knowledge he has gained of his isolation, the isolation of the artist, who is not “a person,” but who must create a self and a world, or, rather, selves and worlds. The difference between lovers and artists, however, may not be as definitive as it seems, for Barth’s fiction implies that Ambrose’s predicament may be universal.

The final story in Lost in the Funhouse is “Anonymiad,” the life story of a minstrel who becomes an artist, perhaps an Ambrose grown up, as well as an alter ego for Barth. If translated into realistic terms, the life of the minstrel would parallel Barth’s literary career. The minstrel grows up singing in a rural setting with the most lovely goatherd maiden as his mistress. Dreaming of fame, he takes his song to the city, where he meets Queen Clytemnestra and becomes a court minstrel. As he becomes more musically adept, he spends more time in court intrigues than with his maiden, Merope. When King Agamemnon goes off to war, an interloper, Aegisthus, steals the Queen’s love, woos Merope, and casts the minstrel on a deserted island with nine casks of wine. To each of these the minstrel gives the name and properties of one of the nine muses. For the remainder of his life the minstrel, without his lyre, composes something new, literature, which he casts adrift in the empty wine bottles. These bottles parallel the sperm cell of “Night-Sea Journey,” transmitting the Heritage.

Isolated on his island, like Ambrose in the funhouse, the minstrel is unhappy. His life has not worked out, his work has been mediocre and unacclaimed, love has failed, and later he says that his “long prose fictions of the realistical, the romantical and fantastical” are not what he meant them to be. He writes these fictions on the island to structure his life; he tans the hides of native goats and sends his manuscripts out to sea in the large urns after drinking up all the wine. Urn by urn, he writes his way through the panorama of fiction’s possibilities. Then he loses interest and decides that all he has written is useless. There is one amphora left, and one goat, hard to catch, whom he names Helen. Rousing himself, he decides to write one final, brilliant piece, his “Anonymiad,” which he hopes will be filled with the “pain of insight, wise and smiling in the terror of our life.” Everything must be deliberated to get all this on a single skin. This is vital, as an earlier work had come floating back to shore in its urn, drenched and unreadable. After painstakingly writing this final piece, the writer sees it only as a “chronicle of minstrel misery.” No more living creatures exist on the island; the writer is totally alone. In spite of these facts, however, the minstrel is content. He has sent his “strange love letter” to Merope, his muse. He knows that “somewhere outside myself, my enciphered spirit drifted, realer than the gods, its significance as objective and undecoded as the stars.” He imagines his tale “drifting age after age, while generations fight, sing, love, expire.” Sadly, he thinks: “Now it passes a hairsbreadth from the unknown man or woman to whose heart, of all hearts in the world, it could speak fluentest, most balmly—but they’re too preoccupied to reach out to it, and it can’t reach out to them.” Like the minstrel, his tale will drift and perish, but as the story ends, “No matter.” A noontime sun “beautiful enough to break the heart” shines on the island, where “a nameless minstrel wrote it.” The collection of stories ends, turning back toward its tabula rasa of origin.

On with the Story

On with the Story gathers together twelve short pieces that Barth had previously published separately in periodicals. He insisted that Lost in the Funhouse, many pieces of which had similarly been published separately, was “neither a collection nor a selection, but a series . . . meant to be received ‘all at once’ and as here arranged.” Reviewers of On with the Story were quick to see that it also constituted a work with its own unity and integrity. Ron Loewinsohn, for example, found a clear structural arrangement: “a dozen stories arranged in three groups of four, concerning beginnings, middles, and endings.” D. Quentin Miller noted the focus provided by Barth’s device of “concluding the book with continuations of the eleven stories that precede the conclusion, in reverse order” and the coherence provided by “the series of interchapters depicting a vacationing husband and wife who exchange stories in bed”—a recycling of the dramatic situation of Shahriar and Scheherazade in Alf layla wa-layla (fifteenth century; The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments, (1706-1708) which he links to Barth’s frequent reliance on the device of the frame tale in his novels. Several stories suggest parallels with this framing story of the couple, who appear to be at the end of or at least at a turning point in their relationship, though these connections are left open for the reader’s speculation rather than filled out in detail.

A thematic principle of coherence is suggested by the book’s two epigraphs, one from the physicist Werner Heisenberg and one from a standard textbook on narrative (cowritten by Barth’s early critical champion Robert Scholes), and several of the stories explicitly parallel the laws of physics with those of narrative. In “Ad Infinitum: A Short Story” and “On with the Story,” for example, Barth takes two of ancient philosopher Zeno of Citium’s paradoxes—Achilles’s inability to catch the tortoise and the arrow that can never hit its target—as the core of stories designed to demonstrate the range of narrative techniques available for the depiction of temporal and spatial relations in fiction.

Barth also forges links between On with the Story and his first book of short stories, Lost in the Funhouse. The narrator of the final story in On with the Story, “Countdown: Once Upon a Time,” was himself, “once briefly lost in a funhouse, and a quarter-century later found a story in that loss,” suggesting his identity with Ambrose, the author-figure from the earlier work. Even the title connects the two works, as the phrase “on with the story” appeared at the end of the author’s note to Lost in the Funhouse. As Loewinsohn stipulates, however, the connection is to be thought of not as a return, the closing of a circle, but rather as the typical Barthian spiral, a near-repetition with a difference: “There it signified a beginning, meaning ‘Let’s get the story started.’ Here it is a plea for continuity: ‘Let’s not allow the story to end.’”

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night

The Book of Ten Nights and a Night: Eleven Stories includes stories the earlier versions of which had appeared in various periodicals during the period 1960 through 2001. As important to the book as the stories, perhaps more important, is the framed narrative that encompasses them. At the outset, the reader is introduced to three recurring characters. Author is Barth or some persona he has invented for himself. Graybard is the narrator, who is smitten with Wysiwyg, the Muse of Story. Her name is an acronym for a term to be revealed later, Author explains, but it never is. She is a beautiful, seductive water nymph, and she and Graybard are soon lovers (metaphorically, he explains). Wysiwyg’s pet name for him is Geeb. After each story is told, she critiques it and guides his further efforts. Author remains in his Scriptorium while dispatching Graybard nightly to the Imaginarium, where the stories are created. The eleven nights of the framed narrative are Tuesday, September 11, through Friday, September 21, 2001, and the terrorist attacks upon New York and Washington are a constant backdrop. Author wonders if it is appropriate at all to be writing stories under the circumstances.

The first story, “Help!” is a schematic, using that single word in every possible sense—declarative, exclamatory, interrogatory—and set to musical notes. Wysiwyg declines to accept it, so “Landscape: The Eastern Shore” becomes the true first night’s story (Maryland’s Eastern Shore is the setting for most of the stories) and recounts the final hours of Claude Morgan, old captain of a dredge-boat. Stories for nights two and three, “The Ring” and “Dead Cat, Floating Boy,” are described by the narrator as creative nonfiction. The first deals with the complications arising from the narrator-protagonist’s discovery of a man’s wedding band while snorkeling off Grand Cayman Island, the other with an attractive woman who seeks his help in aiding a cat who has been run over in the street. Wysiwyg wants no more fact-based fiction, so night four features a sleeping Charles P. Mason, who hears the words “A Detective and a Turtle” as if from a soundtrack, and spends the following eighteen pages searching for a story that will accommodate them both. In “The Rest of Your Life,” the calendar function on the computer of George Fischer breaks, displaying the date as August 27, 1956, leading to ruminations about that particular date and later about the passage of time itself. In “The Big Shrink,” the wealthy host of a party offers his theory that the universe is neither expanding nor collapsing but shrinking. Later, in playing a dangerous word game, the college professor protagonist is trapped into saying that if there were no stigma, guilt, or shame attached, he might well be unfaithful. His wife is disappointed with this purely theoretical response, and, sixteen months later, he senses his marriage, though not unhappy, is shrinking. “Extension,” the story for the seventh night, points up the irony of an aging couple’s desire to expand their rural hideaway at the same time that their lives are contracting. In “And Then There’s the One,” the protagonist Adam’s concern when his seventeen-year-old granddaughter, Donna, blithely announces that she will never have babies leads him to thoughts about the generations of the human race and eventually to the mind-numbing conclusion that, at the least, every person is every other person’s cousin. The story for the ninth night, “9999,” is a numerical extravaganza, recounting Frank and Pam Parker’s near obsession with isodigitals, alternating digiters, sequentials, and the European-style palindromes. “Click” is a study of where and with what results following the links of computer commands will lead. “Wysiwyg” is the story for the eleventh night. Is she another Scheherazade or, as Graybard tells her story, a girl born illegitimate to a Jewish graduate student, adopted by a kindly couple of lapsed Lutherans, and brought up as their own? At thirteen, she learns the truth, and a turbulent, rebellious life follows—or, perhaps, Graybard’s entire tale is fanciful, just as Wysiwyg has been fanciful from the outset.

Where Three Roads Meet

Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas is a study in threes. The first story is “Tell Me”; the second, “I’ve Been Told: A Story’s Story,” is a response to the first; the third and final, “As I Was Saying,” seems to posit that no story ever ends. “Tell Me” features three Freds as main characters: Alfred Baumann (budding scholar), Wilfred Chase (writer with raw but obvious talent), and Winifred Stark (free-spirited fiancé of one and lover of both). They are collegians during the post-World War II period, and not only are they involved in a ménage à trois, but they also form a musical trio performing at a venue called the Trivium. Their world is shattered by Al’s acute myeloblastic leukemia and Winnie’s abortion of Will’s baby. The second novella is a story told by a story. It erratically follows the activities of one Philip Norman Blank, the resemblance of whose name to the phrase “fill in the blank” has been a lifelong irritant to him. Meanwhile, in the framed story, Fred (the story himself), Isidore or “Izzy” (the narrator), and Hitherto Unmentioned Female Third Person (the reader) vie for ascendency in telling Blank’s story. He is left on the side of a highway, out of gas, and with no idea where he was going, while these three key elements of his tale argue among themselves. “As I Was Saying” is primarily an audiotape made by three sisters—Thelma, Grace, and Aggie Mason—on New Year’s Eve, 1999. When the girls, now in their seventies, were undergraduates, they worked their way through college as campus prostitutes. A book written years before by a former customer and friend has recently excited new interest in the subject—especially on the part of the author’s scholar-son. The tape is the sisters’ response. However, in typical Barthian fashion, a narrative voice is heard, supposedly at the end, reminding that all are figments and the end is not really the end.

The Development

The Development is the Heron Bay Estates, a gated community on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, and nine interconnected stories about its residents: primarily retired or late middle-aged, upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxons. Versions of the first eight appeared earlier in various literary magazines; the ninth, “Rebeginning,” acts as a summing up. Barth occasionally plays with the narrative point of view, but, on the whole, these are more conventional stories than those in his previous two collections. A recurring theme is the decline into old age, sickness, and death. Ethel Bailey dies of cervical cancer in “Peeping Tom.” Her distraught widower, Sam, later stabs himself with a borrowed machete (but survives). In the same story, “Toga Party,” Dick and Susan Felton, seeing nothing ahead but the ravages of old age, succeed in committing suicide in their garage after the party. Pete and Debbie Simpson’s much-prized daughter, Julie, is killed by a drunken driver on the Baltimore Beltway. Her death is alluded to in multiple stories. Finally, George and Carol Walsh are crushed beneath the rubble of their house when a freak tornado strikes the Heron Bay Estates in “The End” (which in typical Barth fashion turns out not to be the end). Religion is mentioned in virtually every story but always as a counterpoint to the protagonists’ invariable agnosticism and thorough secularism. The author seems at pains to be saying that, as these characters face the vicissitudes of their stories, they have only their own devices to rely upon.

Bibliography

Barth, John. “Interview.” Short Story, n.s. 1 (Spring, 1993): 110-118. Discusses Barth’s love for the short story and why he does not write more of them. Talks about minimalism and self-reflexivity; examines the nature of the story in The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments and Edgar Allan Poe; explains why he tries to stay as nonideological as possible; surveys the changes in short fiction from the mid-1970’s to the early 1990’s.

Birkerts, Sven. “Lost in the Rest Home (The Development).” The New York Times Book Review, October 5, 2008, p. 13. Addresses the theme of old age and its indignities, which is pervasive throughout the book. The title of the review, of course, plays off the earlier Lost in the Funhouse.

Bowen, Zack. A Reader’s Guide to John Barth. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994. A concise overview of Barth’s first ten books of fiction (through The Last Voyage of Somebody the Sailor), with a short but thoughtful chapter on Lost in the Funhouse. Contains good bibliographies (including one of articles and book chapters on Lost in the Funhouse), a brief biographical sketch, and an interesting appendix: “Selected List of Recurrent Themes, Patterns, and Techniques.”

_______. “Barth and Joyce.” Critique 37 (Summer, 1996): 261-269. Discusses how Barth followed James Joyce in the grandness of his narrative scheme, his ironic focus on a region, and his personal overtones in his fiction. Explores Barth’s anxiety about this influence.

Fogel, Stan, and Gordon Slethaug. Understanding John Barth. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1990. In this text, the authors present a comprehensive interpretation of Barth’s works, from The Floating Opera to The Tidewater Tales. Chapter 6 is devoted entirely to Lost in the Funhouse, with discussion of how Barth’s short fiction fits into his oeuvre. Each chapter includes notes at its end. Fogel and Slethaug have included both a primary and a secondary bibliography. The primary bibliography is especially useful for its list of uncollected short stories, and it includes the stories’ date and place of publication. An index divided by work and a general index conclude the book.

Friedell, Deborah. “If This Were a Headline (Where Three Roads Meet: Novellas).” The New York Times Book Review, December 25, 2005, p. 15. A Christmas Day review of the book, ironically timed, perhaps, because of the dark character of the stories.

Harris, Charles B. Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983. This work has a chapter entitled “‘A Continuing, Strange Love Letter’: Sex and Language in Lost in the Funhouse,” which concentrates on Barth’s stories from the aspect of the reader and writer relationship. Exhaustive notes at the end of the chapter direct the reader to further sources, as does the secondary bibliography at the end of the book. Includes an index.

Kiernan, Robert F. “John Barth’s Artist in the Fun House.” Studies in Short Fiction 10 (Fall, 1973): 373-380. Calls “Autobiography” a tour de force, capturing a fiction in the process of composing its own autobiography. Fiction tends necessarily to a life of its own and to an inordinate degree of self-reflection.

McLaughlin, Robert L. “Review of The Book of Ten Nights and a Night.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 72, no. 5 (March 1, 2004): 191. One of the early reviews of the book, appearing almost immediately after its publication.

Schulz, Max F. The Muses of John Barth: Tradition and Metafiction from “Lost in the Funhouse” to “The Tidewater Tales.” Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990. Schulz concentrates on the themes of “romantic passion and commonsense love” in Barth’s work, with an emphasis on “the textual domestication of classical myths.” In the chapter entitled “Old Muses and New: Epic Reprises, Self-Reflexive Bedtime Stories, and Intertextual Pillow Talk,” Schulz discusses what he calls the “Thalian design” of Lost in the Funhouse. Notes to the chapters are included at the end of the text, as is an index.

Waldmeir, Joseph J., ed. Critical Essays on John Barth. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980. Although an early critical work, this text does contain four essays specifically on Lost in the Funhouse. Each essay includes notes, and a general index can be found at the end of the book.

Walkiewicz, E. P. John Barth. Boston: Twayne, 1986. This book is useful for biographical details: It includes a chronology of Barth’s life and work. Contains also considerable discussion of Lost in the Funhouse, which makes this a good all-around reference. Supplemented by primary and secondary bibliographies, notes, and an index.

Zhang, Benzi. “Paradox of Origin(ality): John Barth’s ‘Menelaiad.’” Studies in Short Fiction 32 (Spring, 1995): 199-208. Argues that in the story “Menelaiad” Barth transforms a mythological story into a postmodern “trans-tale” about the tension between past and the present and between originality and repetition.

James L. Green

Jo-Ellen Lipman Boon

William Nelles

Patrick Adcock