The Funhouse is Ambrose's Life in Fiction

      Evidence that the author John Barth intended the unnamed implied author to be Ambrose himself is apparent in the metaphor of the funhouse throughout the story, and also from textual analysis. While reading through the framework of this conventional story full of metafictional interruptions in "Lost in the Funhouse", the sentence that immediately caught my attention among the difficult-to-trace train of ideas was, "Now and then [Ambrose] fell into his habit of rehearsing the unadventurous story of his life, narrated from the third-person point of view...", and so many confusions that arose while reading became clear. If the implied author of this entire story was Ambrose himself, his struggle to release "one of Western Culture's truly great imaginations" in his seemingly dull and unambitious life of a thirteen year old is vented (satisfactorily or not) in this narration of his own life.
      The allusion to the funhouse appears everywhere in the story: In the title, the beginning, the end, and even prematurely in the story before it is physically reached by the characters of the story, when "we haven't even reached Ocean city yet: we will never get out of the funhouse". In fact, the implied author toys with the idea that the main character of the story, Ambrose, never gets out of the funhouse, and "he died of starvation telling himself stories in the dark" while his brother and Magda makes it out to the exit crying out "in joyful alarm at what next beset them". The funhouse seems to not only be the source of curiosity and endless imagination in the young boy's mind, but also something that he seems to not be able to get out of. The same feeling of being stuck in the funhouse seems to run also in the implied author, heavily supporting the argument that the implied author is actually Ambrose himself. Just as the character Ambrose attempts to release his imagination and possibilities in the funhouse but fails to do so and only wistfully thinks that "he would rather be among the lovers for whom funhouses are designed", the implied author Ambrose also attempts to narrate his life in an imagination-sparking, fictional, and adventurous  manner, but ends up becoming jumbled and confusing in the constant interruptions and revisions to improve it's literary status.
      The countless number of interruptions and revisions that fill this narrative first seemed to serve no other purpose than to distract the reader from the conventional story of a young boy and even possibly leave the reader doubting whether this story was meant to be ready to be read with all these essayistic passages, but once the possibility that the implied author may be Ambrose himself enters the thought process of readers, even these literary rambles start to make sense. The implied author Ambrose consistently interrupts the narration of the story with notes that seem to be meant for his eyes only as the author, including ideas of improvement such as "description of physical appearance and mannerisms is one of several standard methods of characterization used by writers of fiction". He even mentions the Freitag's Triangle as a method of presenting the conventions of a dramatic narrative and includes a diagram in the text, however to the readers these notes seem to only serve to contrast the lacking story itself to how a dramatic conventional story may run. This coincides with Ambrose's feeling of being stuck in the funhouse, and of being unable to escape or truly enjoy the world of fiction even though he desired release and satisfaction in it in the first place.