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 Sartre and to assign himself "masks" to abolish the ego, thus conquering his paralysis by inducing action through taking on symbolic roles.
As part of his schedule of therapies, Jake takes a job teaching at Wicomico State Teachers College, where he becomes friends with history teacher Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie. Joe and Jake enjoy intellectual sparring in a "duel of articulations". 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".
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 "o mask. What you see of them is authentic." But 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.
When Joe discovers that Jake and Rennie have committed adultery, he insists they maintain the affair, in an effort to discover the reasons for his wife's unfaithfulness. 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. Rennie insists on having an abortion, or she will commit suicide. Under an assumed name, Jake hunts for an abortionist, but is unable to find a doctor who will agree to the procedure, so turns to the Doctor. Rennie dies from the botched abortion. His relativist "cosmopsis" confirmed, he reverts to his paralysis. Two years later, as part of his Scriptotherapy on the Remobilization Farm, he writes of what happened in Wicomico.
Read more about this topic: The End Of The Road
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“Ends in themselves, my letters plot no change;
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“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
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“If you need a certain vitality you can only supply it yourself, or there comes a point, anyway, when no one’s actions but your own seem dramatically convincing and justifiable in the plot that the number of your days concocts.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)