The End of the Road

The irony-laden black comedy's protagonist Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities.

A 1970 film loosely based on the novel stars James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin in their earliest feature roles.

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.

As in many of Barth's novels, the setting and characters of The End of the Road have an academic background; most of the story takes place on a university campus.

[12] 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.

[17] 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).

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, An unnamed African-American doctor who claims to specialize in such conditions takes him under his care at his private therapy center, the Remobilization Farm.

[25] The Doctor prescribes Jake "mythotherapy", in which he is to read Sartre and to assign himself "masks" to abolish the ego, inducing action through the adoption of symbolic roles.

"[27] 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.

In the opening chapter, while 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, with his choices restricted.

[40] Barth coined the term "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a sense of seeing and comprehending all available paths of action and the futility of choosing among them.

[44] The Doctor 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.

[51] Choices of wording such as "inscrutable" and "wrinkled brow" appear to Thomas H. Schaub to be deliberate echoes from Melville's novel.

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".

[58] 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.

Jake also expresses a belief that was to manifest itself in Barth's later approach to writing: "To turn experience into speech, that is, to classify, to conceptualize, to grammarize, to syntactify it—is always a betrayal of it, a falsification of it".

[85] Kerner praised 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.

[92] 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".

[93] 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.

[94] 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 demonstrates the contrary.

[c][96] Christopher Conti saw a "moral-satiric design" also found in Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Gardner's Grendel (1971), in which the reader is meant to see through the moral failings of the novels' "monstrous narrators".

[47] To Freud, he writes, the source of such a condition lies in "the chronic existence of love and hatred, both directed towards the same person and both of the highest degree of intensity".

He writes that, anticipating Michel Foucault's theories of the self in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974), all the characters wear self-defining masks that they at some point let slip, and that Jake's paralysis stems from an inability to choose a role with which to participate in society.

"[77] 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.

[101] To literary theorist Michael LeMahieu, Barth's first two novels confront a logical positivist "separation of facts and values" common in postwar American fiction.

[34] 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.

[34] 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.