SOURCE: "'A Continuing, Strange Love Letter': Sex and Language in Lost in the Funhouse," in Passionate Virtuosity: The Fiction of John Barth, University of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 106-26.

Harris is an American educator and critic who specializes in modern American literature. In the following excerpt, he analyzes the relationship between sex and language in Lost in the Funhouse.

One of John Barth's major concerns is the mysterious relationship between sex and other forms of human experience. While implicit in Barth's fiction from the beginning, this relationship receives its first explicit reference in The End of the Road when Jacob Horner makes the following observation:

If one had no other reason for choosing to subscribe to Freud, what could be more charming than to believe that the whole vaudeville of the world, the entire dizzy circus of history, is but a fancy mating dance…. Who would not delight in...