Frame-Tale

"Frame-Tale" is a work of short fiction by John Barth published in Lost in the Funhouse (1968) by Doubleday & Co..

Lost in the Funhouse was nominated for the National Book Award (1968).

Plot and analysis

"Frame-Tale" serves as a three-dimensional representation of the stories that comprise the Funhouse collection as a whole. 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.

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.

Barth, in his retrospective Preface, comments on conceiving "Frame-Tale" and the Funhouse volume:

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."

Footnotes

Sources

• Barth, John. 1968. Lost in the Funhouse: Fiction for Print, Tape, Live Voice. Doubleday & Co., Garden City, N. Y. (Hardback, first edition)
• Barth, John. 1988. Lost in the Fun House. Anchor Books, New York. (Paperback).
• Barth, John. 1987. Preface to Lost in the Fun House. Anchor Books, New York. pp. v-viii. (Paperback).
• Kaufman, Michael T. and Garner, Dwight. 2024. John Barth, Writer Who Pushed Storytelling's Limits, Dies at 93. New York Times, April 2, 2024.https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/02/books/john-barth-dead.html#:~:text=John%20Barth%2C%20who%2C%20believing%20that,of%20storytelling%20with%20imaginative%20and Accessed 20 December 2025.
• Walkiewicz, Edward P. 1986. John Barth. Twayne's United States Author Series, Warren French, editor. G. K. Hall & Co., Boston, Massachusetts.