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7. Lost in the Funhouse
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Lost in the Funhouse, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Creating a New Literary Form
The Limits of Metafiction
Alienation and Authorship
Rivalry, Individuality, and Self-Discovery
Summary
Analysis
Narcissus enters a cave and finds Tiresias, a prophet, inside. Tiresias is supposed to be in Thebes, but he left because an interregnum (a gap in governance or leadership) is occurring, and interregnums are said to be hard on prophets. The narrator describes Narcissus’s beauty and his obsession with himself. Then, the narrator quickly shifts their focus to Echo, who takes the experiences of others, alters them, and then repeats a variation of them to suit her own purposes. Echo is merely a disembodied voice, but when Narcissus speaks to Echo, Echo alters Narcissus’s words and slightly changes their meaning.
“Echo” is the first of several reimaginings of Greek myths found in the collection. Barth treats the reader as if they already know these characters, and it is necessary to know the original Greek myths for these stories to be comprehensible. Here, he is playing with the story of Echo and Narcissus. In the Greek myth, Echo pines after Narcissus and then loses her physical form after he rejects her. As a result, Echo is merely a disembodied voice, capable only of repeating back what others have said to her.
Active
Themes
Tiresias feels he should warn Narcissus not to “know himself” in this way because it will increase Narcissus’s vanity. Not only will Narcissus love himself too much, but he will be loving a distorted version of himself. The story ends with the narrator wondering if Narcissus, Tiresias, and Echo are still in the cave. Alternatively, the narrator suggests, they might be dead. Either way, the narrator believes that “There’s no future for prophets,” whose stories end before they begin.
