Posted by Ai Samurai on September 23, 19102 at 19:25:43:

In Reply to: Short story "lost in the funhouse" posted by tinydancer on September 22, 19102 at 19:05:00:

: Who is the narrator in "lost in the funhouse" :
The narrator really is Ambrose because he manipulates the story to come out third-person. He is the one narrating the story like a funhouse. He is the "Creator." He "rehearses to himself the unadventurous story of his life, narrated from the third-person point of view." Plus, just hearing all of his ruminations and reactions makes the story seem more first-person than third-person omniscient.

:why does "it" choose to put random words in italics and describe what it SHOULD be doing in the story, rather than actually doing it? :
Ambrose uses the writer's speech of what should be done because he observes convention arround him. In actual life, he sees how other kids play and dive, how people socialize, how kids abuse the funhouse, and in storytelling, he observes what society accepts as normal: spare use of italics, normal Freitag's Triangle, character description, etc. However, he does not follow convention because...well, he is Ambrose, an abnormal, keenly astute yet simultaneously lonesome boy beyond his thirteen years. He himself is a precocious Creator of convention, a maker of funhouses; when he tells his story, everything comes out differently and out of order (at least according to convention) because he is innately different. I don't think he can handle convention.

We talked about Creator theories in cl today: Ambrose, who mentions on page 97 that the funhouse operator looks like an old version of Ambrose, is going to be a Creator whether he likes it or not. He is not one of the people who follows conventions like the "lovers in funhouses"

~Ai Samurai

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