night sea journey pdf

We will keep fighting for all libraries - stand with us!

Internet Archive Audio

• This Just In
• Grateful Dead
• Old Time Radio
• 78 RPMs and Cylinder Recordings
• Audio Books & Poetry
• Computers, Technology and Science
• Music, Arts & Culture
• News & Public Affairs
• Spirituality & Religion
• Radio News Archive

• Flickr Commons
• Occupy Wall Street Flickr
• NASA Images
• Solar System Collection
• Ames Research Center

• All Software
• Old School Emulation
• MS-DOS Games
• Historical Software
• Classic PC Games
• Software Library
• Kodi Archive and Support File
• Vintage Software
• CD-ROM Software
• CD-ROM Software Library
• Software Sites
• Tucows Software Library
• Shareware CD-ROMs
• Software Capsules Compilation
• CD-ROM Images
• ZX Spectrum
• DOOM Level CD

• Smithsonian Libraries
• FEDLINK (US)
• Lincoln Collection
• American Libraries
• Canadian Libraries
• Universal Library
• Project Gutenberg
• Children's Library
• Biodiversity Heritage Library
• Books by Language
• Additional Collections

• Prelinger Archives
• Democracy Now!
• Occupy Wall Street
• TV NSA Clip Library
• Animation & Cartoons
• Arts & Music
• Computers & Technology
• Cultural & Academic Films
• Ephemeral Films
• Sports Videos
• Videogame Videos
• Youth Media

Search the history of over 866 billion web pages on the Internet.

Mobile Apps

• Wayback Machine (iOS)
• Wayback Machine (Android)

Browser Extensions

Archive-it subscription.

• Explore the Collections
• Build Collections

Save Page Now

Capture a web page as it appears now for use as a trusted citation in the future.

Please enter a valid web address

• Donate Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape

A night-sea journey

Bookreader item preview, share or embed this item, flag this item for.

• Graphic Violence
• Explicit Sexual Content
• Hate Speech
• Misinformation/Disinformation
• Marketing/Phishing/Advertising
• Misleading/Inaccurate/Missing Metadata

plus-circle Add Review comment Reviews

Download options.

No suitable files to display here.

PDF access not available for this item.

IN COLLECTIONS

Uploaded by station62.cebu on April 18, 2022

SIMILAR ITEMS (based on metadata)

Academia.edu no longer supports Internet Explorer.

To browse Academia.edu and the wider internet faster and more securely, please take a few seconds to  upgrade your browser .

Enter the email address you signed up with and we'll email you a reset link.

• We're Hiring!
• Help Center

The Eternal Rewriting: Language, Existentialism, and Play in Barth's "Night-Sea Journey"

2021, Journal of Artistic Creation and Literary Research

While the self-reflexivity of Barth's short story collection Lost in the Funhouse is largely recognized, locating and defining its key focus has generated wider controversy, with most scholars adopting either a linguistic, metafictional stance, or a philosophical, existentialist one. Taking "Night-Sea Journey" as a case example, this paper aims to conflate both readings of Barth's tales in order to reveal how both principles co-construct each other, for their concerns (as featured in the book) are not only correlative but inseverable. The study's structure, mirroring that of the tale, will map the strategies employed to convey its existential preoccupations, as well as the violation of narrative expectations through which the text's postmodern playfulness breaks in. In this way, the story's concurrent deployment of materiality and transcendence, deep philosophy and light humor, canonical literature and satire, shall all be intertwined toward a comprehensive understanding of the collection's major theme: the cyclical nature of human history, and the eternal rewriting of our stories.

Related Papers

Abdalhadi N A Abu Jweid , Abedalhady Nemer

This article explores, via a postmodern approach, how Barth dealt with the intricate relationship between postmodern fiction and its modern counterpart by constructing a subjective narrative event in his novella, “Lost in the Funhouse”. It examines the transparent and correspondent representation of the narrative event as a category of Barthian critique of modern literary exhaustion, and how Barth appropriates remedial recycling for fictional conventions. This apocalyptic homogeneous narrative device involves a constant reciprocal examination of contemporary fiction and its possible future. It is carried out through mutual subversion and, ultimately, challenges the notion of inherited literary forms and their utilisation over time. As such, the whole narrative event is achieved via a self-reflexive trajectory and multifarious textual solipsism.

masoud madahiian

John Barth‟s “Lost in the Funhouse ” is a prime example of a postmodernist short fiction. The poetics of the work is mainly concerned with questions of ontology and frequently seeks to foreground this notion in different ways so much so that the reader gets lost in a funhouse of reading. Accordingly, the story has been divided into separate worlds, each trying to call into attention its own ontological existence and significance. Barth‟s story self-consciously implements certain techniques at different levels of his work to foreground world formation and draw the reader‟s attention towards the worlds of the text. His story foregrounds different planes, each of which stands independently as an ontological world: the world of language and text, the metafictional level, the projected world level, and the external world of the author. However, the resultant ontological ruptures, which are intentionally induced, cause various complications in the narrative. Ontologies are presented as un...

Amer R . Mahdi

This paper sets itself the task of approaching the shorter fictions of the postmodernist American writer John Barth. It is intended here to show how in Barth's hands the narrative funhouse has become a narrative prison-house by him meshing together the typologies of fiction and labyrinth. By so doing Barth revisits the Platonic cave to question and to further problematise the time-ridden notions of imitation, mimeses, and representation in his criti-fictional writing that self-consciously lays bare the props of realism's claims to reality and reality's claims to realism. The labyrinthine Barthian writing is shown here as making a heavy use of the scientific metaphor of entropy that, in Barth's canon, indicates the literary exhaustion. Through the onion-folds of myth and the mirrors of his narrative funhouse Barth strives to replenish the traces of meaning long lost in the frames of writing and reality. The fictions to be studied or referred to here are selected texts from the writer's chef-d'oeuvre Lost in the Funhouse.

Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory

Ana-Maria Deliu

To what degree does metafiction construct and deconstruct worlds? More specifically, to what degree does metafiction succeed in constructing a verisimilar possible world or, on the contrary, undress it of materiality and the illusion of reality, turning rather to itself as a text? Metafiction as a self-conscious, auto-referential fiction, drawing attention to its mechanisms and its status as an artifact, while a possible world is a world that is credible, ontologically different from ours only in being non-actualised. Moreover, in metafictions like James Joyce's Ulysses, or John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, deconstructing worlds means not only de-materialising worlds, turning to form in an extremely overt way and moving from mimesis of product to mimesis of process, but also the French deconstruction praxis of denouncing the structuralist dichotomy of the signified and signifier, thus loosing oneself in a network of signifiers which ultimately destroy the metaphysics of the signified. After poststructuralism murders the author, the latter revives as a practical fiction in a textual world of indecidables.

Salwa Karoui-Elounelli

Judith Fletcher

This paper identifies Barth's Lost in the Funhouse as a postmodern pastiche of Homer's Odyssey.

Metin BOŞNAK

International Journal of English Language and Translation Studies

Postmodern temporality in literature, as it involves non-linear time and narration, creates a discrepancy between the narrated time and the temporal time of narration, and thus the order of events within a story are playfully dealt with. Complexities become more when there is no sense of ending in such stories. John Barth " s " On with the Story' proves a good case in point in reflecting the poetics of postmodernism by manipulating nonlinear progression of time with multidimensional, discrete, and game-like temporality in creating flickering textual constructions, especially when he puts no endings for his stories and avoids closure to mirror the breakdown of traditional narrative values. Accordingly, the present paper tries to highlight Barth " s narrative techniques in foregrounding nonlinearity and open-endedness in his " On with the Story'. As such, the aim of the study is to determine to what degree Barth " s play with time and narration echo postmodern concerns and how is possible to make sense of a postmodern story by investigating into its textual structure than the mere course of events. Barth " s achievement in the postmodern ground in this story, just like his other ones, not only challenges traditional narrativity and temporality but also presents the reader with a new sense of understanding reality as it is happening around us.

Prof. Dr. Metin Bosnak

Lost in the Funhouse is like textbook illustration of Derrida's views on language and writing. The book is both a guide for "how not to write" and "how not to define" writing, thus defying an ultimate center. Although the lack of a "proper" theme and heavy metafictional structure makes it "difficult to read", it is a struggle to subvert the definitions of writing. The author deconstructs the conventional form and theme that is believed to be necessary for writing. In this respect, Barth operates through the narratives like Derrida moves through ideas in history, and ending up with the conclusion that interplay is what matters rather than a fixed meaning.

ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries

Bojana Aćamović

The paper focuses on Margaret Atwood's novel The Penelopiad and John Barth's short stories "Menelaiad" and "Anonymiad," comparing the approaches of the two authors in their postmodernist retellings of Homer's Odyssey. Both Atwood and Barth base their narratives on minor episodes from this epic, with its less prominent or unnamed characters assuming the roles of the narrators. Using different postmodernist techniques, the authors experiment with the form and content of the narration, combine different genres, and demythologize the situations and characters. In their re-evaluations and reinterpretations of the Odyssey, they create works which epitomize Barth's notion of postmodernist fiction as a literature of replenishment. The comparative analysis presented in this paper aims to highlight the ways in which Atwood and Barth challenge the old and add new perspectives on Homer's epic, at the same time confirming its relevance in the postmodern context.

RELATED PAPERS

Glycobiology

Leena Thorat

Asian Journal of Medical Sciences

Ruchita Tyagi

Asian Journal of Pharmacy and Pharmacology

Dalya Thamer Ahmed

Maya BELHADJ-MOSTEFA

Dieter Cassel

Lecture Notes in Mathematics

Haraux Alain

IEEE Transactions on Power Systems

Martin Bradley

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

Jesus Aguilar

Jurnal Agrofolium

iwan Hasrizart

Arqueologia Subacuatica Espanola Actas Del I Congreso De Arqueologia Nautica Y Subacuatica Espanola Cartagena 14 15 Y 16 De Marzo De 2013 Vol 2 2014 Isbn 978 84 9828 487 4 Pags 355 364

Kiko Higueras

Optics Letters

Eyal Lebiush

Mahanata Wijaya

Francisco Gómez Gómez Gómez Gómez

Hilmy Ardiansyah

International Journal of ChemTech Research

i Ketut Budaraga

Physica E: Low-Dimensional Systems and Nanostructures

Andrew Das Arulsamy

Journal of Clinical Investigation

Holly Loan Nguyen

Journal of the Serbian Chemical Society

Hakan BAHAR

Monuments and Sites

Jorg W E Fassbinder

Agriculture

Karima Yahiaoui

Stefan Gosepath

JURNAL PENELITIAN PENDIDIKAN SOSIAL HUMANIORA

Ahmad Darwis

European Journal of Clinical Pharmacology

Hülya GÜVEN

The Night-Sea Journey & How to Use it in Your Story

• How to be the Heroine of Your Own Story , Mythology

PIN TO READ LATER

Have you ever stood at the edge of an unlit sea at night, and looked out into its blackness? Whether you were in a busy restaurant or walking alone on the sands or even floating on top of the water, I’m sure you contemplated that space where the sea-sky was and invented stories about it.

I’ve been reading Joseph Campbell , as usual, and thinking about how to use light and dark in scenes to symbolise my character’s state in the upper and lower regions of the plot. The idea of the night-sea journey ( die Nachtmeerfahrt¹ ) was described by ethnologist Leo Frobenius in his book, Das Zeitalter des Sonnengottes ( The Age of the Sun God ). He recognised the prevalence of the motif in myths from different parts of the world: the hero travels, often in the belly of a beast or in a vessel (a boat, an ark, a casket), across a dark, primordial sea, mimicking the unseen course of the sun after it sets in the west and then magically reappears in the east. Many ancient peoples surmised (as you probably would, if you hadn’t been brought up on the broth of the round world) that for the sun to perform this kind of feat, it had to travel under the earth or the sea. The sea reflects the sky and “extinguishes” the sun; also, it’s more penetrable than the earth, so it makes sense for a culture that lives near a sea to send their sun-gods down into it.

I only recently learned of a similar journey that the moon makes, and if you’re a (world-)navel-gazer like me, you may also be unaware of it. Every month or so the “old moon” sets for the last time as a sliver in the eastern sky. For about three days it travels invisibly alongside the sun until, magically born anew, it appears on the third day at sunset, on the western horizon. This course not only sets the moon in direct opposition to the sun, it also gives rise to various resurrection myths in which the hero spends three days in the underworld .

Here’s Frobenius’s diagram of the night-sea journey. It might remind you of the lower part of Campbell’s diagram of the hero’s journey and perhaps shed some light (or night) on why it proceeds in an anti-clockwise direction!

SCHEMATIC REPRESENTATION OF THE WHALE-FISH-MYTH A hero is devoured by a water monster in the west ( Devouring ). The animal travels with him towards the east ( Sea-journey ). In the meantime, he lights a fire in the belly ( Fire-lighting ) and when he feels hunger, he cuts himself a piece of the hanging heart ( Heart-cutting ). Shortly thereafter he notices that the fish has slid onto dry land ( Landing ); he begins directly to cut the animal from the inside outwards ( Opening ); then he slips out ( Slipping-out ). In the fish’s belly it had grown so hot that all his hair has fallen out ( Heat-Hair ). Often, at the same time, the hero frees those who were devoured before ( All-devoured ) and they also all slip out ( All-slipping-out ).

Obviously, the first question is: Is a night-sea journey necessary and appropriate to your story?

If yes… Why does the character undertake the night-sea journey? What is the appropriate time for this journey? What pushes the character into undertaking the journey? What is the character struggling with?

The World Navel

Jung in Wandlungen und Symbole der Libido ( Symbols of Transformation ) as well as Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces , interpret the sea as a return to the mother’s womb (the “world navel”), and hence also as a rebirth. Campbell refers to the episode in the monomyth as “the belly of the whale”. This is an inward journey that the character makes as they cross the threshold of adventure and leave the ordinary world behind. The night-sea is a boundary that characters are usually reluctant to cross because it is dark, indistinct and populated with all the monsters that the unconscious can conjure. Of course, Jung is quick to point out that water is a classic symbol of the unconscious, especially useful for submerging suppressed libidinal desires, and it isn’t difficult to discover a sexual “undercurrent” in Frobenius’s whale-myth.

Odysseus undertakes a night-journey while trying to escape Calypso’s island on a make-shift raft. For the past seven years he’s been marooned there as her unwilling lover, unwilling to even attempt an escape and antagonise the goddess. But finally Athene intervenes on his behalf and Calypso is forced to speed him on his way, providing him with all the material for his raft, and food and drink for his long journey (eighteen days). In this way the character can be thrust into the sea, half-unwillingly, but they may also have a helper. It’s also worthwhile to note that the night-sea journey doesn’t necessarily need to take place at night; in fact, to set it in the dark may lean too close to pathetic fallacy. Nor does it need to be a sea crossing. These are simply ways of representing the psychological trials of the character that will arguably be understood universally.

The motif is still everywhere in modern stories. It’s easy to find the counterparts of the sea-monster in ships and submarines, and as I mentioned at the beginning, the sea is one of the few expanses of darkness left us in our urban lives. Of course, space travel has opened up a whole new arena of nothingness – a more complete nothing, perfect for our postmodern age – and as always, artists are the first to explore it in spirit. Nevertheless, we still resort to sea-faring metaphors, as I’m sure trekkies can attest.

What sexual desire is your character trying to hide, control or express? How will you represent the sea in your story? What does it symbolise? How will you represent the belly of the whale in your story? What does it symbolise? How will you represent the vessel in your story? What does it symbolise? How does the character perceive the night-sea journey? Does anyone give the character protective talismans or sustenance before they set out?

Descent to the Underworld

So is there a difference between the journey to the underworld ( katabasis ) and the night-sea journey? Well, I think the latter can be a part of the former, but (at least for the purposes of storytellers) they’re actually two motifs governed by differing rules. The underworld is usually under ground rather than water. It is the land of the dead, where the hero communes with the spirits of the beloved or the renowned ( nekyia ) as Odysseus does in The Odyssey , and as Dante does in The Divine Comedy . Also in this sort of journey, the hero often has a quest to retrieve something that was lost (such as Orpheus trying to recover his wife, Eurydice), or to learn something (such as Odysseus consulting Tiresias). So if you’re following The One Page Novel , you’ll find that the katabasis or night-sea journey fits perfectly at the transitional Quest stage.

Like the night-sea journey, the descent to the underworld is a journey of death and rebirth (beautifully depicted in the myth of Persephone, for example). The hero dies and goes underground, where he is tested by the gods of the underworld. If he is found worthy, he passes the initiation and is allowed to continue his journey. If not, he must remain in the shadows forever. These days, the failed hero lives almost exclusively in the domain of literary fiction; popular culture is obsessed with success to the detriment of every other artistic concern (plot, character development, common sense, etc). But I digress… The belly of the whale can also be a figurative land of the dead, populated by the people the beast has previously swallowed. In this case, the hero’s act of cutting himself out and setting the others free seems to parallel the monomyth’s hero crossing back into the ordinary world and bringing the elixir of life with him.

Jung equates the River Styx, although it isn’t a sea, with the waters of the night-sea journey. All souls must cross the Styx, yet however dark, inhospitable and terrifying it appears, it remains the changeable, mysterious maternal sea that keeps you afloat and spits you out once again into the world, reborn like the sun.

EXERCISE Is the night-sea journey part of a longer descent to the underworld? Who judges your character’s worthiness in the underworld? Who else does he meet in the underworld? How does this journey advance the character on their quest? Do they find something in the underworld that they bring back with them?

Self-communion

In the fool’s journey of the Tarot, the night-sea journey is represented by The Hermit – a card symbolising seclusion, silence and self-reflection. This is the essence of the experience of the crossing for the character. Whether they have a companion or not, they alone can make the transition. Adrift in the night-sea, they have no choice but to listen to the voices in their head. Odysseus, like my character, Orman (see below), deals with his unconscious by talking to it. I do like Lawrence’s phrasing: “heavily did he commune with his own high courage,” and a little later: “he questioned his own brave spirit”. Such is the power of the journey that even a renowned hero like Odysseus is reduced to tears and prayer, and to questioning the very characteristics that make him “Odysseus”. Accolades and epithets, alas, count for nothing, and it is only when the character is stripped of them that they begin to understand who they really are and are able to learn their true name.

How does your character deal with their fear? If they talk to themselves, what part of their self do they address? What is the tone of their questioning? How are they sequestered from the world and from other people? What epithets is the character forced to part with? What does the character learn about their real character and their true name?

The Ego, The Threshold Guardians & The Old Boatman

It’s impossible for me to write this essay and not mention the night-sea journey from my favourite book, His Dark Materials . This is from the final part, The Amber Spyglass . I’ve tried to elide any spoilers:

The path turned to the left, and a little way along, more like a thickening of the mist than a solid object, a wooden jetty stood crazily out over the water. The piles were decayed and the planks were green with slime, and there was nothing else; nothing beyond it; the path ended where the jetty began, and where the jetty ended, the mist began. Lyra’s death, having guided them there, bowed to her and stepped into the fog, vanishing before she could ask him what to do next. “Listen,” said Will. There was a slow, repetitive sound out on the invisible water: a creak of wood and a quiet, regular splash. Will put his hand on the knife at his belt and moved forward carefully onto the rotting planks. Lyra followed close behind. The dragonflies perched on the two weed-covered mooring posts, looking like heraldic guardians, and the children stood at the end of the jetty, pressing their open eyes against the mist, and having to brush their lashes free of the drops that settled on them. The only sound was that slow creak and splash that was getting closer and closer. … Then suddenly there was the boat. … Only the boatman and the dragonflies seemed indifferent to the journey they were making. The great insects were fully alive and bright with beauty even in the clinging mist, shaking their filmy wings to dislodge the moisture; and the old man in his sacking robe leaned forward and back, forward and back, bracing his bare feet against the slime-puddled floor. The journey lasted longer than Lyra wanted to measure. Though part of her was raw with anguish … another part was adjusting to the pain, measuring her own strength, curious to see what would happen and where they would land.

Pullman’s description has so many archetypal elements, that I wonder whether he worked them in deliberately, or whether much of it was simply “instinctive”. This is Campbell’s point, after all, that these images are all available to us in the collective unconscious. First of all, if you’ve read the trilogy, you’ll know the great price the children have to pay in order to cross. Whether the hero travels across the surface, or is pulled down into the depths, psychologically they are at a difficult crossing. They must relinquish their ego, a process which Pullman describes in the most heart-wrenching terms of any story I know. The ego is the identity we spend our lives building with intricate care. To be torn from it is to accept that it has all been a sham: that the opposite of our way of life, our opinions and our best behaviours is just as valid (or invalid); that stripped of it all we simply don’t know who we are. This process can even end in literal or figurative self-dismemberment: complete self-annihilation.

The dragonflies are the threshold guardians, symbols of the water of life, of the transience of existence, and of the transformation that the children are about to undergo. Dragonflies belong to the order Odonata, from οδόντoς, meaning “tooth”, because they have toothed mandibles ( so says Wikipedia , anyway, I don’t know much about it). This draws an interesting comparison with the teeth of the beast (“the jaws of death”), which Campbell equates with the threshold guardians:

The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale.

Perhaps I’m reading too much into the text, but after all, why do we write if not to create and disseminate meaning and to inspire others to do the same? The dragonflies flit easily to and fro because they are already free of the ego. Campbell again:

The hero whose attachment to ego is already annihilate passes back and forth across the horizons of the world, in and out of the dragon, as readily as a king through all the rooms of his house. And therein lies his power to save; for his passing and returning demonstrate that through all the contraries of phenomenality the Uncreate-Imperishable² remains, and there is nothing to fear.

I don’t know about you, my friend, but that brings tears to my eyes.

And finally, just like the anti-clockwise hero’s journey, we see the spirit guide leading the children down “the left-hand path”, which is “a passage by way of the senses – the eyes, the heart and spontaneity of the body – to a realization and manifestation ‘at the still point of the turning world,’ in act and experience on earth, of the radiance, harmony, bounty, and joy of nature at the summit of Mount Helicon, where the lyre of Apollo sounds, the Graces dance in tripody, and the golden rose unfolds.” (Campbell, Creative Mythology ). Which, of course, is precisely the message of His Dark Materials . Matter loves matter.

What does the threshold represent in your story? How is the threshold depicted? Where is the threshold? How is the threshold approached? What sort of guardians would be appropriate symbolically? How do the guardians challenge the character? Do the guardians pass easily back and forth across the threshold? How and why? Is there a guide figure? If so, how do they lead the character? How does the character shed their ego? What is the sacrifice they make? Does the character pass the threshold successfully? Does your character have a companion in the night-sea journey?

I hope I may have given you some idea of how writers adapt these archetypal stories to their own purposes and how you can do the same. Let me leave you with this wonderful poem by Dan Albergotti (from Town Creek Poetry ):

Things to Do in the Belly of the Whale Dan Albergotti Measure the walls. Count the ribs. Notch the long days. Look up for blue sky through the spout. Make small fires with the broken hulls of fishing boats. Practice smoke signals. Call old friends, and listen for echoes of distant voices. Organize your calendar. Dream of the beach. Look each way for the dim glow of light. Work on your reports. Review each of your life’s ten million choices. Endure moments of self-loathing. Find the evidence of those before you. Destroy it. Try to be very quiet, and listen for the sound of gears and moving water. Listen for the sound of your heart. Be thankful that you are here, swallowed with all hope, where you can rest and wait. Be nostalgic. Think of all the things you did and could have done. Remember treading water in the center of the still night sea, your toes pointing again and again down, down into the black depths.

¹ Nachtmeer – so deceptively like “nightmare”! Jung also points out incidental similarities between words for sea, mother, fate, and nightmare. Etymology can be quite unsatisfactory at times… ² Uncreate-Imperishable – referring to Parmenides: “There is one story left, one road: that it is. And on this road there are very many signs that being is uncreated and imperishable, whole, unique, unwavering, and complete.” (from Wikipedia )

Image credit: Der Mönch am Meer by Caspar David Friedrich

I write about literature, language, love, and living off your pen. Also, fortifying fiction, personal amelioration, and tea.

Lay out your story on one page.

Build a framework for stronger characters.

Form a paper model of your story world.

This page contains affiliate links which help support the site.

You are signing up to receive email training. You can unsubscribe at any time.

You will receive occasional emails about Alemmia & the Law of Attraction. You can unsubscribe at any time.

Subscribe to Blog via Email

Enter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.

Email Address

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse

Analysis of John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on May 28, 2021

“Lost in the Funhouse” begins with young Ambrose, who was possibly conceived in “Night-Sea Journey,” now an adolescent, traveling to Ocean City, Maryland, to celebrate Independence Day. Accompanying him through his eventual initiation are his parents; his uncle Karl; his older brother, Peter; and Magda, a 13-year-old neighbor who is well developed for her age. Ambrose is “at the awkward age” (89) when his voice and everything else are unpredictable. Magda becomes the object of his sexual awakening, and he feels the need to do something about it, if only barely to touch her. The story moves from Ambrose’s innocence to his stunned realization of the pain of self-knowledge. John Barth uses printed devices— italics, dashes, and so on—to draw attention to the storytelling technique throughout the presentation of conventional material: a sensitive boy’s first encounters with the world, the mysterious “funhouse” of sexuality, illusion, and consciously realized pain.

As the story develops, Barth incorporates comments about the art of fiction into the narrative: “Should she have sat back at that instant, his hand would have been caught under her. . . . The function of the beginning of a story is to introduce the principal characters, establish their initial relationship, set the scene for the main action . . . and initiate the first complication or whatever of the rising action” (92). These moments, when the voice seems to shift outside Ambrose’s consciousness, actually unite the teller with the tale, Barth with his protagonist, and life with art. As the developing artist, Ambrose cannot forget the least detail of his life, and he tries to piece everything together. Most of all, he needs to know himself, to experience his inner being, before he will have material to translate into art.

John Barth/The Paris Review

When Ambrose is lost in the carnival funhouse, he develops this knowledge. Straying into an old, forgotten part of the funhouse, he becomes separated from the mainstream—the funhouse represents the world for lovers—and has fantasies of death and suicide, recalling the “negative resolve” of the sperm cell from “Night-Sea Journey.” Ambrose also finds himself reliving past incidents with Magda and imagining alternative futures.

These experiences lead to Ambrose’s fantasy that he is reciting stories in the dark until he dies, while a young girl behind the plyboard panel he leans against takes down his every word but does not speak, for she knows his genius can bloom only in isolation. This fantasy is the artistic parallel to the sperm’s union with “Her” in “Night-Sea Journey.” Barth thus suggests that the artist’s creative force is a product of a rechanneled sexual drive. Although Ambrose prefers to be among the lovers in the funhouse, he is constructing his own funhouse in the world of art.

Analysis of John Barth’s Novels

Share this:

Categories: Literature , Short Story

Tags: American Literature , Analysis of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , appreciation of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , criticism of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , guide of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse analysis , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse appreciation , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse criticism , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse guide , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse notes , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse plot , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse structure , John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse themes , Literary Criticism , notes of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , plot of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , structure of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , summary of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse , themes of John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse

Related Articles

You must be logged in to post a comment.

Jungian Therapy, Jungian Analysis, New York

Night sea journey, from jung lexicon by daryl sharp.

Night sea journey . An archetypal motif in mythology, psychologically associated with  depression  and the loss of energy characteristic of  neurosis .

The night sea journey is a kind of  descensus ad inferos- -a descent into Hades and a journey to the land of ghosts somewhere beyond this world, beyond consciousness, hence an immersion in the unconscious.[“The Psychology of the Transference,”CW16, par. 455.]

Mythologically, the night sea journey motif usually involves being swallowed by a dragon or sea monster. It is also represented by imprisonment or crucifixion, dismemberment or abduction, experiences traditionally weathered by sun-gods and heroes: Gilgamesh, Osiris, Christ, Dante, Odysseus, Aeneas. In the language of the mystics it is the dark night of the soul.

Jung interpreted such legends symbolically, as illustrations of the regressive movement of energy in an outbreak of neurosis and its potential progression.

The hero is the symbolical exponent of the movement of libido. Entry into the dragon is the regressive direction, and the journey to the East (the “night sea journey”) with its attendant events symbolizes the effort to adapt to the conditions of the psychic inner world. The complete swallowing up and disappearance of the hero in the belly of the dragon represents the complete withdrawal of interest from the outer world. The overcoming of the monster from within is the achievement of adaptation to the conditions of the inner world, and the emergence (“slipping out”) of the hero from the monster’s belly with the help of a bird, which happens at the moment of sunrise, symbolizes the recommencement of progression.[“On Psychic Energy,”CW8, par. 68.]

All the night sea journey myths derive from the perceived or of the sun, which, in Jung’s lyrical image, “sails over the sea like an immortal god who every evening is immersed in the maternal waters and is born anew in the morning.[“Symbols of the Mother and of Rebirth,”CW5, par. 306.] The sun going down, analogous to the loss of energy in a depression, is the necessary prelude to rebirth. Cleansed in the healing waters (the unconscious), the sun (ego-consciousness) lives again.