Lost in the Funhouse Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Robert F. Kiernan

SOURCE: "John Barth's Artist in the Funhouse," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. X, No. 4, Fall, 1973, pp. 373-80.

Kiernan is an American educator and critic. In the following essay, a small portion of which was included in CLC-3, he discusses the story sequence of Lost in the Funhouse as demonstrative of a Künstlerroman.

In the "Author's Note" that prefaces the first American edition of Lost in the Funhouse, John Barth maintains with wonderful solemnity that the book is "neither a collection nor a selection, but a series." It is sometimes difficult to know when such instances of Barth's solemnity are to be taken seriously, but this seems to be one of them. At least when reviewers of the book tended to disregard the note and to see the volume as unified only in a loose manner by Barthian humor and by an intermittent concern with literary "exhaustion," the...
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