Abstract
“Petition”, the sixth piece in John Barth’s Lost in the Fun House, is a letter from a Siamese twin to a visiting Siamese king, requesting financial support for an operation to separate the twin from his boorish and unpleasant brother.
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Notes
Lost in the Funhouse (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 59.
Ibid., p. 60.
Phaedo, 66b-e; trans., Hugh Tredennick.
R. D. Laing, The Divided Self (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1965). David Morrel calls attention to the mind-body theme in “Petition” in his John Barth: An Introduction (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976), pp. 86 and 110.
In Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, eds., The Philosophical Works of Descartes (United States: Dover Publications, 1955), Volume I, 152.
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1098a; trans., J. A. K. Thomson.
Lost in the Funhouse, p. 61.
Ibid.
D. Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Great Britain: Oxford University Press, 1888), 415.
Ibid.
The Floating Opera, revised edition (New York: Bantam Books, 1972), p. 62.
Ibid.
The End of the Road (New York: Bantam Books, 1969), p. 68.
Ibid.
Ibid.
For further discussion of these novels, see my “Nihilism, Reason, and Death: Reflections on John Barth’s Floating Opera,” in A. T. Tymieniecka, ed., The Philosophical Reflection of Man in Literature (Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1982), 137–51
For further discussion of these novels, see my “Nihilism, Reason, and Death: Reflections on John Barth’s Floating Opera,” in A. T. Tymieniecka, ed. The Ideal of Rationality (Atlantic Highlands, NJ.: Humanities Press International, 1985), ch. 2.
Lost in the Funhouse, p. 68.
Descartes, Meditation VI.
Lost in the Funhouse, p. 110.
“Song of Myself”, Section 32. Interestingly, these lines appear as the opening epigram in Bertrand Russell’s book, The Conquest of Happiness.
My thanks are due to Linda Nathanson and Bill DeAngelis for their comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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© 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers
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Nathanson, S. (1990). The Plight of the Siamese Twin: Mind, Body, and Value in John Barth’s “Petition” . In: Tymieniecka, AT. (eds) The Elemental Passions of the Soul Poetics of the Elements in the Human Condition: Part 3. Analecta Husserliana, vol 28. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-009-2335-5_22
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