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 nihilistic paralysis—an inability to choose a course of action. 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 book deals with several issues that were controversial at the time, including 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.
Read more about The End Of The Road: Publishing History, Overview, Plot, Themes, Style, Characters, Reception and Legacy, Adaptations
Famous quotes containing the words the end of, the end, the and/or road:
“As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their ocellated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“I often wish for the end of the wretched remnant of my life; and that wish is a rational one; but then the innate principle of self-preservation, wisely implanted in our natures, for obvious purposes, opposes that wish, and makes us endeavour to spin out our thread as long as we can, however decayed and rotten it may be.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“Saigon was an addicted city, and we were the drug: the corruption of children, the mutilation of young men, the prostitution of women, the humiliation of the old, the division of the family, the division of the country—it had all been done in our name.... The French city ... had represented the opium stage of the addiction. With the Americans had begun the heroin phase.”
—James Fenton (b. 1949)
“Through the hollow globe, a ring
of frayed rusty scrapiron,
is it the sea that shines?
Is it a road at the world’s edge?”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)