BARTH'S “LOST IN THE FUNHOUSE”: SHORT STORY TEXT INITS GYGLIC CONTEXT by GERALD GILLESPIE While the short story “Lost in the Funhouse” can stand as an independ- atwork, it also is the pivotal story in the book of stories bearing its name. ‘Tis an adequate appreciation of its qualities must take into account the ggeclal dimensions that it acquires, and helps create, in the book. I find it diffeult to explicate John Barth's fiction more clearly than he himself does in interviews and essays or internally in his works. But since critical attention has focused mainly on his novels, it is useful to consider in detail the sense of his fourteen short stories grouped under the name of Lost in the Funhouse, which as a story was first published separately just a few mths after his manifesto, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (August 1967), in The Atlantic Monthly, This essay, to which I shall turn, deals with the same questions as his experimental cycle then well underway. The opening paragraph of the “Author's Note” to the first edition of the book Lost in the Funhouse: Flotion for Print, Tape, Live Voice (New York: Doubleday, 1988) makes it plain: This book differs in two ways from most volumes of short fiction, First, its neither a collection nor a selection, but a series; though several of its items have appeared separately in periodicals, the series will be seen to have been meant to be reocived “all at once” and as here arranged. Most of its members, consequently, are “new”—written for this book, in which they appear for the first time. (B ix)? Iksides corroborating that the set in its entirety constitutes a genre, Bazth’s | ppc Sines Barth added notes ia 1960, I shall cite the convenient Bantam paperback (tecond) edition dition as B, followed by page number. The position of stories within the | de will be: Roman numerals, Best's other works will be cited by page umber in their Thal respeatve orga edn 3, Forrest L, Ingram, “The Dynamics of Short Story Cycles,” The New Orleans Heolew, 2 (1970), 7-12. 223, Copyright (¢) 2000 Bell & Howell Information and Learning Company Copyright (e) Newberry College