Toward Postmodern Fiction--A Study Of John Barth's Lost In The Funhouse

John Barth is often regarded as a postmodern writer, whose prime interest lies in the gamefulness of language. An academic as well as a writer, his literary works are believed to manifest his theoretical reflections. His short story collection Lost in the Funhotise, in particular, is seen as a work of relentless experiments, which does not aim at the communication of meaning. This thesis, however, seeks to examine the other side of Earth's work through reading Lost in the Funhouse as an attempt on the author's part to develop a postmodern aesthetics.The thesis consists of five parts. Chapter One takes a brief look at the history of the 1960s when postmodern fictions began to emerge, and then sketches the overall structure and contents of Lost in the Funhouse. I indicate that during the 1960s, the problematic relationship between the real and the unreal and the constructed nature of meaning were questioned. Such skepticism found expression in the works of postmodern American writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Thomas Pynchon, who experimented with such avant-gardist techniques as metafiction and pastiche in order to explore those problems. In Chapter Two, I argue that the overwhelmingly self-reflexive stories of Lost in the Funhouse dramatize Earth's attempt to overcome literary exhaustion-a problem that he believes to afflict contemporary writers. In his 1967 essay "The Literature of Exhaustion," Barth proposes that writers could find their way out of this trouble by trying to "turn the felt ultimacy against itself to create something new. Lost in the Funhouse is, to me, an application of this proposal. The carefully organized stories trace the history of literature and describe the literature of exhaustion. Through metafiction, Barth partly succeeds in coping with the difficulties of making new literature. Chapter Three discusses Earth's effort in the book to combine traditional and modern techniques. Barth sees history as allowing repetition and recurrence. Therefore he argues in "The Literature of Replenishment" that a true postmodernist "keeps one foot always in the narrative past ... and one foot ... in the Parisian structuralist present." In Lost in theFunhovse, which somehow anticipates his theory of eclectic synthesis, Earth fuses radically different novelistic modes to create a new form for the purpose of replenishing literature. In Chapter Four, I suggest that Lost in the Funhouse is a book written with a serious intention to renew art in the wake of its exhaustion. The stories in the book are sometimes referred to by the writer himself as love stories, but what they really do is reaffirm literature by viewing it in relationship to human experience of love. The teller, the tale and the told are interdependent, and all of them are motivated by love. By comparing art to love, Earth reasserts the validity of literature. The thesis concludes by observing that Earth is not after all so much a pure experimentalist as a serious writer concerned with the contemporary situation of literature and its future, and his literary works, Lost in the Fimhouse, in particular, reflect such concerns.