Lost In The Subject-house-A Lacanian Study Of Lost In The Funhouse

Lost in the Funhouse is John Barth’s fifth novel. It is one of Barth’s most widely-read novels. For this book, John Barth is recognized as one of America’s most brilliant postmodern writers. Barth’s important status in literature is based on his experiment and innovation on narration both in theory and practice. Since this novel’s publication, critics at home and abroad studied it from the perspectives of theme, existentialism, postmodern writing technique, structure and reader response as well as language style. All these efforts done by the previous critics have made great achievements, but for this thesis, the problem of subjectivity expressed in this novel seems particularly important, especially through Lacan’s theory of the Subject.This thesis contains four chapters:Chapter One is a brief introduction to John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse and literature review on Lost in the Funhouse as well as Lacan’s theory of the Subject which will be used in this thesis.Chapter Two is an analysis of Ambrose’s identification with the specular image in the imaginary order. During the process of constructing the subject, Ambrose’s ego is formed followed by alienation.Chapter Three is an analysis of Ambrose’s split subject. With the entrance of language in the symbolic order, the desire for death becomes stronger. Moreover, the subject is represented by a signifier for another signifier. Ambrose’s subject is doomed to be a split one.The last chapter is the conclusion part. Based on the above analysis, the thesis draws a conclusion that the journey of Ambrose’s psychological struggle is the process of the formation of the subject. Self identification is merely an illusion. Actually, the so-called self identification is the identification of the other.