Lost in the Funhouse in its brilliant conception and execution dramatizes an early attempt of Barth to fuse into one viable contemporary form the differing novelistic modes realistic, parodic, and metafictionalof the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and thereby to rejuvenate the storytelling conventions of Western culture. That he means the Poor earthly casket' of novel pretending to be book of short stories to carry such an important freight is established by him in the hermeneutical design of Petition. The sixth of the stories constituting Lost in the Funhouse, it has disturbed readers by its apparently incongruous placement, and even inclusion, in the serial sequence. Barth intends it to be obtrusive, I believe, for it typologically prefigures the binary nature of the book as whole. It combines factual reference to actual person and event and realistic deployment of the epistolary form with self-referential justification for its having been written; and thus as microcosm of the whole it offers the reader structure of discourse whose verbal procedure is model of the overall configuration of Lost in the Funhouse. In Petition, a pretty young contortionist (p. 62)2 named Thalia precipitates crisis between para-Siamese brothers joined to rear my belly to the small of his (p. 58). Both fall in love with her. But only the front brother is capable of coupling, he salivating and grunting upon her after night (p. 63), while the back brother is left to commune with an imagined earnest, mute (p. 67) second Thalia imprisoned within the feral, vulgar creature (p. 63) who welcomes his brother's gross advances. The epistolary story ends with