In the following excerpt, Seymour praises Barth's technical mastery of narration in "Lost in the Funhouse."
One of the most puzzling things about the John Barth short story "Lost in the Funhouse" is its apparent neglect. It has not been neglected by the reading public, presumably; after all, the story first appeared in a mass-market magazine and has since been included in a volume of Barth's short fiction (available in a paperback edition from a mass-market publisher), not to mention the current edition of The American Tradition in Literature. I mean, rather, the neglect, in recent years, of commentators. When it first appeared, in 1968, the volume that contains "Lost in the Funhouse," Lost in the Funhouse, received generally unfavorable reviews. Though perforce hastily conceived, these reviews were not entirely wrong, for there are a number.....
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