“Lost in the Funhouse” -- A New Perspective

.           This short story was one that I found exceedingly fascinating, yet vastly difficult to comprehend. Immediately I tried to rack my brain for a way to follow the strange nature of the story’s narrative style. The irrelevant, sporadic, seemingly disconnected thoughts made no sense to me at first glace. Eventually, I decided that I needed something to help me obtain a better outlook as to where the narrator was getting his ideas. Although the interpretations mentioned in Reading Narrative Fiction suggest that the author has employed such strange narration as a means of testing the boundaries of the importance of literary continuity, I initially interpreted the intent to be much different. My initial understanding of the bazaar narrative styling led me to diagnose the narrator of “Lost in the Funhouse” as a schizophrenic. From such a diagnosis, the narrative took a very interesting turn of interpretive meaning.  

            One symptom of schizophrenia is a type of jumbled, ill filtered, and illogical means of verbalization known as “word salad.” For people experiencing “word salad,” it is impossible to control which thoughts appear only in the mind and which thoughts get projected out into the world. Many possible exemplars of “word salad” are found in the narrative styling found in “Lost in the Funhouse.” For example, the sporadic inclusion of various literary rules and patterns such as the explanation of the proper usage of italics; the phenomena of dashing out proper nouns; or the pyramid of plot progression. While most authors would most definitely consider such ideas, they would likely keep such commentary under wraps, perhaps making notes in the margins of a rough draft and scrapping the annotations prefacing publication. The narrator of “Lost in the Funhouse” however, does not scrap such annotations. He appears to be critiquing his own work as he goes along, a schizophrenic experiencing “word salad” would most likely do the same. In one video documenting the life of a schizophrenic it can be observed that as a man well consumed by his schizophrenia attempts to recount an event from his life, he simultaneously critiques his own grammar, causing his tale to be disorderly and nearly impossible to comprehend from an outsiders point of view.

            Beyond the inclusion of unfiltered, seemingly irrelevant literary decorum, many other schizophrenic tendencies also appear in “Lost in the Funhouse.” The narrator has this obscure idea of this “funhouse” that is not so easily understood by the reader, yet seems to make perfect sense to the narrator himself. The funhouse could almost be interpreted as a sort of hallucination, only in the mind of the narrator. The narrator also includes many thoughts that come across as incomplete, such as the mentioning of how he would help lost children get out of the funhouse if he were the operator, and the abrupt dropping of the subject as soon as the method is about to be revealed to the reader. The narrator cannot slow his mind enough to focus completely on one particular aspect of the world that he is describing. Lastly, and perhaps most prominently, the narrator’s thoughts appear relatively obsessive and compulsive (obsession being yet another symptom associated with schizophrenia). The narrator cannot help himself from fixating on obscure detail, such as the image found on the cigarette case, or from stressing over literary fact and accepted configuration of plot exposition.

Viewing “Lost in the Funhouse” as though it is told from the perspective of a schizophrenic adds a new level of depth to the short story. From such a perspective the intent of the novel’s sporadic narration is no longer purely for the sake of pushing the boundaries of literary form, but also for the sake of revealing a key component of the narrator’s persona that could not have been seen from a merely physical/visual standpoint.