Toward the beginning of his confession, the narrator of Dostoevsky's Notes from Underground writes, "I am firmly convinced not only that a great deal of consciousness, but that any consciousness is a disease." John Barth, among other recent writers who deal with the theme of identity in the tradition of Dostoevsky, takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource—namely, the subject of his fiction. Then, he forces the reader to experience self-consciousness by making him as aware of his role as reader as Barth is of his role as writer. The reader engages in a dialogue with a series of narrators, with reader and narrator consciously dependent upon one another. In challenging himself to sport with, to create a "game" out of this situation, Barth on the one hand educates his reader to confront the problem of self-consciousness, at the same time that he challenges himself to play an exemplary game with such a created reader. Writing innovative fiction of artifice, he attempts to create a reader who, if he appreciates the story first, comes also to enjoy the "good clean fun" of the verbal and technical "circus tricks." Thus, he educates a reader capable of engaging in virtuoso reading.
In spite of the Barth-like Genie's claim in Chimera that the relationship between "teller" and "told" is a "love-relation, not a rape," Barth does not, as might be expected, always woo the reader. At times he even seems disdainful, as though he resents his dependence upon the reader for the existence of tale and teller. Most notably in Lost in the Funhouse, Barth uses extravagant and shocking methods to elicit the reader's response. Although these concerns are present in all of Barth's work, he considers self-consciousness and engages in elaborate sport with the reader most explicitly in "Lost in the Funhouse," "Life-Story," and "Title" in Lost in the Funhouse and in "Dunyazadiad" and "Bellerophoniad" in Chimera.
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