Themes
The End of the Road is rich in recurring metaphor. In the opening chapter, when visiting 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.
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". 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", and abandons it along with his job, car and apartment.
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.
Barth coined the term "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a "state of universal comprehension, universal weariness, universal futility". 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." To cope with his inability to make decisions, Jake is prescribed three therapies by his Doctor—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").
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Famous quotes containing the word themes:
“I suppose you think that persons who are as old as your father and myself are always thinking about very grave things, but I know that we are meditating the same old themes that we did when we were ten years old, only we go more gravely about it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi’ite fundamentalists.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b. 1941)