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Night-Sea Journey

• John Barth
• Lost in the Funhouse

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Outline

• Introduction John Barth
• Lost in the Funhouse "Oh God comma I abhor
  self-consciousness.
• Night-Sea Journey

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Introduction John Barth

• Prolific and influential metafictionist
• His first few novels are existentialist dark
  comedy (e.g. The Floating Opera, The End of the
  Road), and his novels become longer and more
  intricate (in the over-plotting track).
• Literature of Exhaustion (1967)
• Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
• -- influenced by the revolutionary
• passion of the time,
• highly experimental.

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Literature of Exhaustion Replenishment

• Exhaustion
• Realism a dead end
• Todays novelists need to confront the exhaustion
  of realist literary techniques-- an artist may
  paradoxically turn the felt ultimacies of our
  time into material and means for his work --
  paradoxically, because by doing so he transcends
  what had appeared to be his refutation (71). 
• . . .novels which imitate the form of the Novel,
  by an author who imitates the role of Author
  (72)
• his own novels as examples the use of labyrinth
• Literature of Replenishment a creative synthesis
  of realism, modernism and postmodernism.

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Lost in the Funhouse

• Starts with Frame Tale -- the Moebius Strip
  (????) --endless circle with a twist in the
  middle.? circular, self-referential
• The growth of Ambrose as a sperm? a child? and
  then his struggling with writing ? and his mythic
  tales.

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"Night Sea Journey"

• Although this story is about a sperm, it can also
  be interpreted as a story about an artist or
  human beings in general.
• Clues p. 7 8, 11
• A swimmer-hero a She ? in a night-sea and maker
  of future night-seas

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1. Different interpretation of the journey

• A. the narrator lack conviction  
• "my own invention?" p. 3 p. 9 out of blind
  habit 5
• Exhausted and dispirited. P. 3
• Reflective moments wonder, doubt and despair.
• Two choices give up and go under embrace the
  absurdity p. 5
• B. Others or the group
• A common Maker ?N the journey partakes of their
  absurdity.
• Love! Love! for Love ? ignorance of what
  whips us. Dream of the Shore.
• p. 4 out of interest in swimming
• p. 5 conformity
• ambition for race at a younger age p. 8

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1. Different interpretation of the journey (2)

• a cynics view
• Father pp. 6 -7
• unconscious
• doesnt care
• wishes us unmade
• perverse, etc.
• the end of the journey extinction? -- nihilism
• thousands of seas and Makers, Makers in their own
  sea, pluralism pp. 7-8

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The Sperm in the present

• No longer scoff p. 9 purged of opinions, etc.
• I may be the only survivor, tale-bearer p. 9 ?
  may have been drowned
• The new emotion

• The friend
• Our destination a mysterious being p. 10
  consummation, transfiguration, etc.
• A hero stops the cycle, refuses her proffered
  immortality.

What do you think about the ending?
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The Sperms Decision

• Not love.
• some unimaginable embodiment of myself (or myself
  plus Her if thats how it must be)
• To You stop your hearing against Her song!
  Hate love!
• ? senseless love and senseless death.

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Ending

• A. Personal-biological level
• End of the life of a sperm (or male ego)
• sexual intercourse may not be for love
• B. Personal-Existential level
• Thinkers or doers, we dont know where the Shore
  is or whether there is one.
• There are different interpretations of the goal
  of human life.
• C. Global level
• We are in a night-sea (or many seas) producing
  night-seas, which can be productive or
  self-destructive.