Volume 14, Issue 1, 2014
Ben Blumson
Pages 111-120
A Never-Ending Story
Take a strip of paper with ‘once upon a time there’ written on one side and ‘was a story that began’ on the other. Twisting the paper and joining the ends produces John Barth’s story Frame-Tale, which prefixes ‘once upon a time there was a story that began’ to itself. In this paper, I argue that the possibility of understanding Frame-Tale cannot be explained by tacit knowledge of a recursive theory of truth in English.