Lost in the Funhouse

Here, Ambrose returns, as we join the family’s Independence Day drive to the Ocean City beach and boardwalk funhouse. Instead of exposition and details about the journey, save for minor physical descriptions, like “two straps discernible through the shoulders of her sun dress” (72), Barth alternates delivering random detailswith describing in technical terms how a realist story proceeds. We receive essentially no description of the funhouse; instead, we follow a discursive narrator stuck in a mirror maze, a metaphor for consciousness and our attempts to understand the self. This technique subverts a traditional teenage ideal love narrative, and the notion of the narrator as hero, replacing these with self-reflexive intellectualizing.

Ambrose and his brother Peter want to impress Magda, a fourteen-year-old girl, who sits between them in the car. Up front, Uncle Karl smokes and makes inappropriate remarkswhile Ambrose’s mother–seated between her husband and Karl–playfully chides Karl. Meanwhile, the narrator interrupts to share: “A fine metaphor, simile, or other figure of speech, in addition to its obvious ‘first-order’ relevance to the thing it describes, will be seen upon reflection to have a second order of significance” (71).