The End of the Road (1955, revised 1967) is John Barth's second novel. It follows Jacob Horner (as in Little Jack Horner) as he gets over an extreme case of psychological paralysis: he just can't see a reason to make decisions, any decisions. After some therapy with the extremist Doctor D, Horner gets a job as a grammar teacher at Wicomico State Teachers College. There he meets Joe Morgan, who is an extreme existentialist: he has forsaken objective (also most subjective) values and hopes only to live coherently. Joe Morgan actually is quite like Horner, except altogether humorless, tyrannical, without lightness, or sense of caprice or the absurd. “I've no right to expect you or anybody to accept anything I do or say — but I can always explain what I do or say,” claims Joe. Jacob Horner ends up sleeping with Morgan's wife, Rennie, who finds herself gladly taking on the rigid values and thinking styles of the strongest personality around her, being amenable to her own form of hyper-rationality. This development so startles Joe that he implores Rennie to keep sleeping with Jacob. Though she finds this repulsive, or almost so, she wants to placate Joe by remaining consistent. One can readily infer that Joe Morgan would prefer her to be strong and make a decision on her own. Horner's inability to know his own feelings, however precisely and fatuously he describes them, or, as he prefers, his ability to feel multiple things equally the same, maddens Joe, and Rennie as well. Joe wishes both parties to explain, fully and clearly, why they cheated, one of many futile demands in the story. John Simmons Barth (born May 27, 1930) is an American novelist and short-story writer, known for the postmodernist and metafictive quality of his work. ... Existentialism is a philosophical movement emphasizing individualism, individual freedom, and subjectivity. ...

The seemingly philosophical maze-wandering all ends darkly, with an abortion (performed by Doctor D) that kills Rennie, gets Joe Morgan fired, and sends Jacob Horner back into his paralysis and reinvolvement with the doctor.

In the novel Barth deftly explores important themes: the folly of taking philosophies to logical extremes, and the need to accept and embrace paradox as well as be able to combine, or at least try, various and flexible philosophies to survive in the larger world. Horner the distanced main character is extremely introverted, uselessly selfconscious, helplessly observational. As a critique of self-insight, then (or at least of insight without any vital or meaningful involvement), of bizarre therapies, of tediously self-referential debate and a distinctly academic kind of selfconsciousness, of what it means to live (or strongly attempt to live) without emotions or taking them into account, the "End of the Road" is, while hardly "Hamlet," powerful and effective — especially in having the reader identify with its characters' variously destructive impotences. It also is, some feel, an icily compelling take on the academic 1950s and the disconnect between thinking and feeling.

Tragic images, for example of Laocoon, crop up throughout; Jacob Horner is focused particularly on Laocoon's eyes. Too, his first lover declares ominously, “God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes, God damn your eyes.” Laocoön (Greek Λαοκοων, pronounced roughly La-oh-koh-on), son of Acoetes, was allegedly a priest of Poseidon (or of Apollo, by some accounts) at Troy; he is famous for warning the Trojans in vain against accepting the Trojan Horse from the Greeks, and for his subsequent divine execution. ...

The novel was made into an odd, miscast, tonally maladapted (Barth rightly called it "vulgar") 1970 movie, written by Terry Southern and directed by Aram Avakian.

Work Cited

Barth, John: 1967 Doubleday & Company, Garden City, New York.