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The End of the RoadThe End of the Road is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. The irony-laden black comedy's protagonist Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"�an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. 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 Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie. The trio become entangled in a love triangle, with tragic results. The story deals with issues controversial at the time, such as sexuality, racial segregation, and abortion.

Barth and his critics often pair the novel with its predecessor, The Floating Opera (1956); both were written in 1955, and they are available together in a one-volume edition. Both are philosophical novels; The End of the Road continues with the conclusions about absolute values made 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 Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and LETTERS (1979).

Critics have been divided over whether Barth identified with the book's protagonist, who retreats from emotion and human relations through language and intellectual analysis; Jake prefers to keep even his sexual relations impersonal. Language is presented as a distortion of experience, yet nevertheless unavoidable. In his later novels Barth forefronted the artifice in his writing, beginning with The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), a work Barth conceived as the last of a "loose trilogy of novels".

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, in part because of a graphic abortion scene.

Plot
In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.

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, An unnamed African-American doctor who claims to specialize in such conditions takes him under his care at his private therapy center, the Remobilization Farm.

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"�and to Joe "seriously" means sometimes beating his wife. The Doctor prescribes Jake "mythotherapy", in which he is to read Sartre and to assign himself "masks" to abolish the ego, inducing action through the adoption of symbolic roles. Jake seeks out a woman, Peggy Rankin, whom he had earlier picked up; when she rebuffs him, he succeeds in seducing her again by striking her, in imitation of Joe.

While Joe busies himself with 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 such outing, 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 "[n]o mask. What you see of them is authentic." 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.

Unmoored from the anchor that Joe has been for her, Rennie commits adultery with Jake; when Joe discovers it, 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; when Peggy refuses to help him find one, he strikes her. Unable to find a physician who will agree to the procedure, Jake turns to the Doctor. Rennie dies from the botched abortion. His relativist "cosmopsis" confirmed, Jake reverts to his paralysis. Two years later, as part of his Scriptotherapy on the relocated Remobilization Farm, he writes of his Wicomico experience.

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