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For the film adaptation, see End of the Road (1970 film). For similar titles, see End of the Road (disambiguation).
The End of the Road
Cover
1st edition (Doubleday, 1958)
AuthorJohn Barth
LanguageEnglish
GenreNovel
Publication date
1958
Publication placeU.S.
Preceded byThe Floating Opera 
Followed byThe Sot-Weed Factor 

The End of the Road is American writer John Barth's second novel, first published in 1958 with a revised edition in 1967. Its first-person protagonist, Jacob Horner, suffers from a nihilistic paralysis called "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from the available possibilities. As part of a schedule of unorthodox therapies, Horner's nameless Doctor has him take a teaching job at a local teachers' college. There Horner befriends the super-rational existentialist Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie, with whom he becomes entangled in a love triangle, with tragic results. The story deals with controversial issues of the time, such as racial segregation and abortion.

Critics and Barth himself often pair the novel with its predecessor, The Floating Opera (1956); both were written in 1955, and are available together in a one-volume edition. Both are philosophical novels; The End of the Road continues with the conclusions made about absolute values by the protagonist of The Floating Opera, and takes these ideas "to the end of the road". Barth wrote both novels in a realistic mode, in contrast to Barth's better-known metafictional, fabulist and postmodern works from the 1960s and later, such as The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Lost in the Funhouse (1968).

A 1970 film loosely based on the novel stars James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin in their earliest feature roles. It was rated X, partially because of a graphic abortion scene.

Publishing history

While teaching at Penn State, Barth embarked on a cycle of 100 stories he called Dorchester Tales; he abandoned it halfway through to begin his first two published novels. He completed both The Floating Opera and The End of the Road in 1955.[1] Appleton—Century—Crofts published The Floating Opera in 1956, but sales were not strong enough to encourage the publisher to pick up Barth's next offering, which was felt to be too similar to the first book. The End of the Road was published by Doubleday in 1958; it received only marginally more attention than The Floating Opera.[2] A revised edition in 1967 restored material originally intended to be in the book, and had a new introduction by Barth.[3]

Overview

Jacob Horner is presented as the author of the book, a first-person confession;[4] Barth's working title was What I Did Until the Doctor Came.[a][5] Stated to have been written on October 4, 1955,[6] the story is set in 1951–53.[6] It takes the form of a psychodrama as therapy for Horner; his Doctor tells him "fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life".[7]

As in many of Barth's novels, the setting and characters have an academic background; most of the story takes place on a university campus. Barth spent most of his adult life teaching at universities.[8] The novel tackles controversial contemporary issues such as abortion (which had yet to achieve wide social acceptance) and racial segregation.[9]

The End of the Road can be viewed with The Floating Opera (1956) as forming the early, existentialist or nihilist phase of Barth's writing career. This phase was realistic in a modernist sense; it lacked the fantastic elements that manifested themselves in Barth's experimental phase that began with The Sot-Weed Factor (1960).[10] Both novels, while displaying a distinctive Barth style, followed conventions readers expected from a novel,[11] and were part of the realist trend in novels prevalent in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s.[12] Barth has said he wrote The End of the Road to refute the worldview presented in The Floating Opera, by carrying "all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road",[13] and that the second novel was a "nihilistic tragedy" paired with the "nihilistic comedy" of the first.[14] Barth also sees the book as the second of a "loose trilogy of novels" that concludes with The Sot-Weed Factor, after which he embarked on the fabulist Giles Goat-Boy (1966).[15]

Plot

Jacob "Jake" Horner suffers from "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose from among all possible choices he can imagine. Having abandoned his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, he becomes completely paralyzed in the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Baltimore just after his 28th birthday; a nameless African-American doctor who claims to specialize in such conditions takes him under his care. At the Doctor's private therapy center, the Remobilization Farm, Jake is given "mythotherapy" in which he is instructed to read Jean-Paul Sartre and to assign himself "masks" to abolish the ego, thus conquering his paralysis by inducing action through taking on symbolic roles.[16]

As part of his schedule of therapies, Jake takes a job teaching at Wicomico State Teachers College,[17] where he becomes friends with history teacher Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie.[18] Joe and Jake enjoy intellectual sparring in a "duel of articulations".[19] The philosophical Morgans have a marriage in which everything must be articulated, and in which "the parties involved are able to take each other seriously".[20] In nearby Ocean City, Jake has a sexual encounter with local schoolteacher Peggy Rankin,[21] to whom he assigns the role of "Forty-Year-Old Pickup" as part of his mask-making mythotherapy;[22] the encounter is awkward and leaves Peggy in tears.[21]

While Joe is busy working on his Ph.D. dissertation, he encourages Rennie to teach Jake horseback riding. During their rides, Rennie and Jake talk at length about the Morgans' unusual relationship. After returning from one of their outings, Jake encourages a resistant Rennie to spy on her husband. She is convinced that "real people" like Joe are not "any different when they are alone"; such people have "[n]o mask. What you see of them is authentic." What Rennie sees of Joe while spying disorients her and her vision of him—he masturbates, picks his nose, makes faces, and sputters gibberish syllables to himself.[23]

Jake and Rennie commit adultery; when Joe discovers it, he insists they maintain the affair, in an effort to discover the reasons for his wife's unfaithfulness.[13] Rennie discovers she is pregnant, but cannot be sure whether Joe or Jake is the father. The Morgans visit Jake, Joe with Colt .45 in hand.[24] Rennie insists on having an abortion, or she will commit suicide. Under an assumed name, Jake hunts for an abortionist;[25] when Peggy refuses to help him, he hits her.[26] Unable to find a doctor who will agree to the procedure, Jake turns to the Doctor. Rennie dies from the botched abortion. His relativist "cosmopsis" confirmed, Jake reverts to his paralysis.[27] Two years later, as part of his Scriptotherapy on the relocated Remobilization Farm, he writes of his Wicomico experience.[28]

Themes

Photograph of a sculpture. A bearded man and two boys fight to free themselves from sea serpents that entangle them.
Jake Horner frequently consults the tortured face of a Laocoön bust.

The End of the Road is rich in recurring metaphor. In the opening chapter, when in the Doctor's Progress and Advice Room, Jake finds himself in the awkward position of having to choose the manner in which he will sit, but finds his choices restricted. Jake notes that Rennie has made the same sort of choice-that-is-not-a-choice by remaining married to Joe; and Joe, in opposition to his philosophies, has to make a "choice" about Rennie's adultery and pregnancy.[29]

On his mantel Jake keeps a bust of Laocoön sculpted by a dead uncle. As Laocoön was bound by serpents, Jake feels himself bound into inaction "by the serpents Knowledge and Imagination, which ... no longer tempt but annihilate".[30] This is reflected in Laocoön's grimace, which Jake frequently consults. After the disaster of Rennie's abortion, Jake tells the bust, "We've come too far",[31] and abandons it along with his job, car and apartment.[32]

Horse symbols permeate the text. Rennie, an accomplished rider, and her husband whip their heads back and forth horse-like when they laugh. Joe is fond of the epithet horseshit when pointing out nonsense. His surname, Morgan, is the name of an American breed of horse. Joe's consistent sureness, his "rationality and absence of 'craft or guile'", according to Thomas Schaub, seem to echo the Houyhnhnms, the race of rational horses in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels.[30]

Barth coined the term "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a "state of universal comprehension, universal weariness, universal futility".[33] Jake Horner takes Jean-Paul Sartre's famous existentialist line, "existence precedes essence", saying "existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence."[34] To cope with inability to make decisions, the Doctor prescribes three therapies: the arbitrary principles of Sinistrality ("If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left"), Antecedence ("if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier") and Alphabetic Priority ("choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet").[35]

Style

The End of the Road is written in a realistic style that may come as a surprise to those more familiar with Barth's later books. The narrator avoids naturalistic descriptions of his surroundings, and most other details, and describes the physical aspects of life (especially of women) with disgust or contempt. He indulges in occasional bursts of eloquence: "A turning down of dinner damped, in ways subtle past knowing, manic keys on the flute of me, least pressed of all, which for a moment had shrilled me rarely".[36]

Naturalism makes a significant appearance in the 12th chapter, in which Jake witnesses Rennie's botched abortion and finds himself unable to conquer his emotions with reason. Jac Tharpe saw this change of style as evidence that the chapter had originated as a separate story that was integrated into the novel; Charles B. Harris sees the "sudden use of naturalistic details" as taking on an "integral function" in the book, one prepared by the previous chapter with the subtle introduction of some passing naturalistic detail.[36]

Characters

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Jacob "Jake" Horner
Constantly aware of the many possibilities in life, Jake is paralyzed by his inability to choose from among them.[37] In his own words, he is able "to maintain with perfect unenthusiasm contradictory, or at least polarized, opinions at once on a given subject".[38] Completely arbitrary, Horner seems the epitome of unreason to Joe Morgan's ultra-rationality,[35] though Rennie comments that he and Joe "work from a lot of the same rational premises". He is scrupulously attentive to details, recording the possible positions of his arms and legs in the Progress and Advice Room; making note of who was on top first, or on which shoulder he was bitten, and which brand of condoms were used in his affair with Rennie; even parsing the grammar of sentences for the reader.[39] He submits even his emotions to the ordering processes of reason.[40] The name "Jake Horner" is reminiscent of the rationalizing Little Jack Horner, as well as of the horns of a cuckold.[41]
Joe Morgan
A photograph of light brown horse in a field, taken from the side, the horse facing right
Horse imagery permeates the text. Joe Morgan's surname invokes a breed of horse, the Morgan (pictured).

Joe is consistent, decisive, rational, and lacking "craft or guile",[42] and is thus entirely certain of everything.[43] An existentialist, he believes he has rid himself of arbitrary values and arrived at his essence.[18] He believes that if something exists, it can be articulated.[44] His definition of marriage requires that "the parties involved be able to take each other seriously". Despite Jake's making fun of Rennie, he likes Jake for appearing to take her seriously, as he believes few men take women seriously.[30] He is voyeuristic in the rationalized probing of his wife for the minute details of her ongoing affair with Jake.[26]

Rennie Morgan
Rennie is married to Joe, whom she looks up to. Joe has twice knocked her out in the past.[26] Jake describes her as a "clumsy animal".[21] Her birth name is Renée, a name signifying rebirth, and her maiden name was MacMahon—"reborn son of man", perhaps signifying rebirth in Joe's image, according to Thomas Schaub.[45] Both Joe and Jake observe and treat her like a patient.[26]
The Doctor
Described by Jake as "bald, dark-eyed, and dignified",[21] the unnamed, elderly African-American Doctor specializes in immobility and paralysis. He is an existential ultra-pragmatist who prescribes "Mythotherapy" to move Jake beyond his paralysis by giving him arbitrary decision-making principles and having him take on identities by wearing "masks"—assuming roles.[46] Because of racial segregation that would not end until 1954, he is unable to buy himself a cup of coffee at the bus station; he works outside of the law, and is unable to give Rennie an abortion in the safety of a hospital.[6]
Peggy Rankin
In line with the Doctor's instructions to Jake of assigning people roles, Miss Rankin is the "Forty-Year-Old-Pickup",[47] a local schoolteacher Jake has picked up like "a bird who perches on the muzzle of [his] gun".[22] In imitation of Joe, Jake hits her, once to woo her, the other time when she will not help him find an abortionist.[26]

Reception and legacy

A 1958 Time magazine review called The End of the Road "that rarity of U.S. letters—a true novel of ideas".[48] In the Chicago Review in 1959, reviewer David Kerner called it an "ideological farce", a genre he considered a "special type" with few contemporary examples.[b][50] Kerner praises Barth's "coherence of ... allegory", "depth of ... feeling for ideology", and "excellence of intention", but argues that the work's realistic style is at odds with the farcical, two-dimensional characters, who lack a "human and social setting" to give them roundedness and credibility.[51]

A photograph of a middle-aged man in glasses and a jacket
The End of the Road was an inspiration for the 1997 novel As She Climbed Across the Table by Jonathan Lethem (pictured).

Jonathan Lethem wrote of the influence The End of the Road had on his novel As She Climbed Across the Table (1997), which also involves a love triangle in an academic setting. In Lethem's novel, the narrator, in a position similar to Joe Morgan's, experiences the dilemma of "losing a woman to a rival who", like Jake Horner, "refuses to provide any fixed identity to hate, compete with, or understand".[52]

Critical views

As The Floating Opera and The End of the Road make little display of the metafictional formal prowess of Barth's later works, critics often overlook them. Some consider these first two novels little more than apprentice works, while others see them in light of the later works, removed from their historical and social context.[53]

Critics have been divided on whether Barth identified with the narrator's beliefs; this appeared probable to John Gardner, Richard W. Noland and Tony Tanner, while Beverly Gross and Campbell Tatham believed the tragic ending was evidence to the contrary. Philosopher Robert C. Solomon included excerpts from the book in a collection on existentialism. Christopher Conti saw a "moral-satiric design" also found in Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Gardner's Grendel (1971), in which the reader was meant to see through the moral failings of the novels' "monstrous narrators".[54]

Critic Cynthia Davis sees the women in Barth's early works as lacking the choice-making, identity-forming dynamism of the men; Rennie has no viewpoint of her own, only ones formed by Joe or Jake. Davis states, "Only as bodies do Barth's women defy male control: in sex, in pregnancy, in death."[55] To Judith Wilt, Rennie appears to assert herself in a seeming determination to die on the abortion table, cutting herself with the curette and inhaling her own vomit; there is no evidence in the book beyond her own assertion that Rennie had ever been pregnant.[56] Barth returned to the subject of abortion in Sabbatical in 1982.[57]

Adaptations

The End of the Road is the only one of Barth's works to have been adapted to film.[29] Director Aram Avakian's loose adaptation End of the Road (1970) stars James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin in their earliest feature roles. Graphic scenes, such as those of the botched abortion and what Barth calls a "man rapes chicken" scene not found in the book, earned the film an X rating. Barth and critics widely panned the movie; Barth wrote disdainfully about it in the introduction to the 1988 single-volume edition of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road.[58] Academics Ken Pellow and Rita Hug opined that the linguistic, literary and philosophical aspects of the book made it difficult to adapt; they argue that Jake Horner's frequent speaking to the reader is key to the book's effectiveness but does not lend itself to film.[29]

Director Paul Edwards made a stage adaptation of the novel for Roadworks Productions in 1993, with John Mozes as Jake, Kate Fry as Rennie, and Patrick McNulty as Joe. Edwards makes Jake's immobility central to the play; it opens with him seated and writing, and closes with him doing the same until the audience has left.[59] The production won a Joseph Jefferson Award in 1993.[60]

Notes

  1. ^ Barth reinforces this fact in his 1979 novel LETTERS.[5]
  2. ^ Kerner names Nigel Dennis's 1955 novel Cards of Identity as one example of this genre.[49]

References

  1. ^ MacGowan 2011, p. 143; Schaub 1991a, p. 182.
  2. ^ MacGowan 2011, p. 144.
  3. ^ Grausam 2011, p. 25.
  4. ^ Schaub 1991a, p. 182.
  5. ^ a b Haen 1983, pp. 54–55.
  6. ^ a b c Schaub 1991b, p. 182.
  7. ^ Harris 1983, p. 40.
  8. ^ Safer 1989, p. 88.
  9. ^ Schaub 1991a, p. 183.
  10. ^ Alsen 1996, p. 153.
  11. ^ Harris 1983, p. 101.
  12. ^ Haen 2002, p. 32.
  13. ^ a b Meindl 1996, p. 185.
  14. ^ MacGowan 2011, p. 143.
  15. ^ Grausam 2011, p. 26.
  16. ^ Hoffmann 2005, p. 204; Raz 2002, p. 239–240; Kannan 1997.
  17. ^ Safer 1989, p. 89.
  18. ^ a b Kannan 1997, p. 123.
  19. ^ Wilt 1990, p. 39.
  20. ^ Harris 1983, p. 46; Schaub 1991a, p. 188.
  21. ^ a b c d Harris 1983, p. 41.
  22. ^ a b Schaub 1991b, p. 178.
  23. ^ Wilt 1990, pp. 41–42.
  24. ^ Wilt 1990, p. 42.
  25. ^ Posen 2011.
  26. ^ a b c d e Harris 1983, p. 34.
  27. ^ Kannan 1997, p. 123; Wilt 1990, pp. 39–40; Meindl 1996, p. 185; Harris 1983, p. 38.
  28. ^ Harris 1983, p. 39.
  29. ^ a b c Pellow & Hug 1999.
  30. ^ a b c Schaub 1991a, p. 188.
  31. ^ Paris 1997, p. 80.
  32. ^ Karl 2004, p. 53; Schaub 1991b, p. 183; Harris 1983, p. 39; Paris 1997, p. 80.
  33. ^ Elias 2001, p. 228.
  34. ^ Alsen 1996, p. 153; Harris 1983, p. 47.
  35. ^ a b Safer 1989, p. 91.
  36. ^ a b Harris 1983, pp. 41–43.
  37. ^ Gray 2011, p. 638.
  38. ^ Harris 1983, pp. 32–33; Pellow & Hug 1999.
  39. ^ Harris 1983, p. 33.
  40. ^ Harris 1983, pp. 36–37.
  41. ^ David 1977, p. 159.
  42. ^ Schaub 1991a.
  43. ^ Harris 1983, pp. 32–33.
  44. ^ Harris 1983, p. 46.
  45. ^ Schaub 1991b, pp. 177–178.
  46. ^ Kannan 1997, pp. 122–123.
  47. ^ Wilt 1990, pp. 40–41.
  48. ^ Kerner 1959, p. 59.
  49. ^ Kerner 1959, p. 60.
  50. ^ Kerner 1959, pp. 59–60.
  51. ^ Kerner 1959, pp. 63–67.
  52. ^ Lethem 1997.
  53. ^ Grausam 2011, p. 24.
  54. ^ Conti 2012, pp. 81–82.
  55. ^ Davis 1986, p. 113–114.
  56. ^ Wilt 1990, pp. 39–40.
  57. ^ Wilt 1990, p. 38.
  58. ^ Harris 2012, p. 135.
  59. ^ Sheridan 1993.
  60. ^ Madison & Hamera 2006, p. 551.

Works cited

Academic journals

  • Conti, Christopher (2012). "The Aesthetic Alibi in The End of the Road". Modern Fiction Studies. 58 (1): 79–111. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • David, Jack (1977). "The Trojan Horse at the End of the Road". College Literature. 4 (2): 159–164. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Davis, Cynthia (1986). "Heroes, Eart Mothers and Muses: Gender Identity in Barth's Fiction". In Spector, Judith (ed.). Gender Studies: New Directions in Feminist Criticism. Popular Press. pp. 110–119. ISBN 978-0-87972-352-1. {{cite book}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Harris, Charles B. (2012). "The End of the Road vs. End of the Road: The Perils of Adaptation". Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. 53 (2). Taylor & Francis: 135–148. ISSN 0011-1619. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Kerner, David (1959). "Psychodrama in Eden: The End of the Road by John Barth". Chicago Review. 13 (1): 59–64, 67. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Pellow, Ken; Hug, Rita (1999). "The Curious History of End of the Road". Literature/Film Quarterly. 27 (1). {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
  • Posen, Solomon (2011). "The Abortion and the Abortionist". Hektoen International. 3 (1). Retrieved 2012-06-18. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help); Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)

Books

Newspapers

Web

Further reading

  • Dyer, Joyce (1987). "Barth's Use of the Bust of Laocoon in The End of the Road". The Southern Literary Journal. 19 (2): 54–60. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |month= ignored (help)
  • Hoskins, Robert V. III (1979). "Swift, Dickens, and the Horses in The End of the Road". The James Madison Journal (37): 18–32.
  • Tharpe, Jac (1974). John Barth: The Comic Sublimity of Paradox. Southern Illinois University Press. ISBN 978-0-8093-0702-9.

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