The Dialogue Of The Self And The Other In John Sarth's Lost In The Funhouse

• Main Authors: Fan, Yen-Jen, 范燕珍
• Other Authors: 陳長房
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 1994
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/05264119560535014560

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學系 === 82 === 　　John Barth has advocated his idea of "repetition" in "Literature of Exhaustion" (1967). To extricate one from the aporia of the "used-upness" of literature, one may, as Barth claims, deliberately repeat or parody the old forms to produce something "new and solid " just like those innovative writers such as Borges and Beckett have done. This thesis will start with Barth's idea of the repetiton with a difference as declared in his essay above and then dwell on a discussion of the self/other dialogue in John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse. 　　For Bakhtin, life is an event of co-existence and the self is formed somewhere in the borderline in the self/other dialogue. Yet, the protagonists in Lost in the Funhouse are portrayed as entrapped in a narcissistic circle which has rendered the self/other dialogue impossible. Moreover, in their narcissistic monologues, the protagonists have shown their enthrallment to the Symbolic Father which has reduced them into the repetition of It. Engrossed by the image of an ideal Father--the Good Form, the protagonists are compelled to repeat in a symbolic universe of difference . The outlet or the "loophole" out of the narcissistic circle, however, is inherent in the protagonists's utterances running throuthout the whole series. This "carnival impulse" to break from the narcissistic circle is released at the final story of Barth's oeuvre. The nameless minstrel of the last story in the series has come to affirm the difference within repetition in a constant self/other dialogue as if a "strange and continuing love letter" (LF 200). 　　As a refraction of his intention, Lost in the Funhouse has embodied John Barth's attempt at a literature of exhaustion. In his deliberate repetition of the old novel form, John Barth has achieved something "new and solid." Moreover, in his solution to the aporia confronted by the modern man, John Barth has produced in his experimental text a "new human work," or in terms of Bakhtin, a true "novel," which has marked out the stage in the development of human civilization.