ABSTRACT
John Barth in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) used the linked story collection to gather experimental fictions that individually couldn’t generate longer, more continuous narratives. What makes this book more than a document of trial and error is Barth’s play with the circumstances involved in the delivery of narrative across storytelling media—oral and written—in fictional pieces arranged to give the impression of stages in the archetypical hero’s journey. The chapter examines how Barth’s stories, some first published in The Atlantic and Esquire, give the impression of oral storytelling through deliberate written composition, a frequent quality of the linked story collection, in light of the contemporaneous excitement surrounding the ideas of Marshall McLuhan on media.
