Plot and analysis
"'Frame-Tale'...happens to be, I believe, the shortest short story in the English language (ten words); on the other hand, it's endless." —John Barth in his Preface to Lost in the Funhouse (1987). [3]
"Frame-Tale" serves as a three-dimensional representation of the stories that comprise the Funhouse collection as a whole. [4] If the reader follows Barth's directions, a Möbius strip will be constructed from a portion of the page on which the story is printed in large font in capital letters. The story will read "ONCE UPON A TIME THERE WAS A STORY THAT BEGAN" endlessly. [5]
Biographer and critic Edward Walkiewicz suggests that "Frame-Tale" represents a "recycling of elements from Barth's own fictions and of the oral-literary tradition" as well as Barth's fascination with the ancient tale of Scheherazade in A Thousand and One Nights. [6] [7]
Barth, in his retrospective Preface, comments on conceiving "Frame-Tale" and the Funhouse volume:
Though the several stories would be more or less stand alone (and therefore be anthologizable), the series would be strung together on a few echoed and developed themes and would circle back upon itself…emblematic of Viconian eternal return, but to make a circuit with a twist to it, like a Mobius strip, emblematic of—well, read the book. [8]
If the "headpiece" of the collection is "Frame-Tale," the final story, "Anonymiad," is the "tailpiece" of the series, returning to Barth's literary "labyrinth." [9]