The End of The Road - Overview

Overview

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

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. The novel tackles controversial contemporary issues such as abortion (which had yet to achieve wide social acceptance) and racial segregation.

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). Both novels, while displaying a distinctive Barth style, followed conventions readers expected from a novel, and were part of the realist trend in novels prevalent in the United States during the 1940s and 1950s. 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", and that the second novel was a "nihilistic tragedy" paired with the "nihilistic comedy" of the first. Its author also sees the book as the second of a "loose trilogy of novels" that concludes with The Sot-Weed Factor, after which Barth embarked on the fabulist Giles Goat-Boy (1966).