The End of the Road in Reading 1001

Dec 29, 2007 Tiffany rated it did not like it

Shelves: fiction, 1001-books

Listed in the overwhelming book of lists, 1001 books you must read before you die. God forbid it be the last book you read before you die. Depressing as all get out--two out of the three main characters are spineless and the other one seems to be a psychopath. The lone female character--her personality and ultimate fate--made me feel just icky.

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Aug 24, 2015 Kristel rated it liked it

Shelves: 1001-books, 1001-challenge, postmodern, philosophy

So read this and then never reviewed it. Not sure why but now I will. I listened to the short book as an audio. It is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. It's a dark comedy that is considered a philosophical novel. I read it along with his other list novel, The Floating Opera. This book, continues with the conclusions about absolute values made by the protagonist of The Floating Opera, and takes these ideas "to the end o So read this and then never reviewed it. Not sure why but now I will. I listened to the short book as an audio. It is the second novel by American writer John Barth, published first in 1958, and then in a revised edition in 1967. It's a dark comedy that is considered a philosophical novel. I read it along with his other list novel, The Floating Opera. This book, 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" Jacob Horner suffers from a nihilistic paralysis he calls "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. 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. The story narrates the first-person confession Jacob Horner in the form of a therapeutic psychodrama (a real type of therapy). The novel addresses controversial topics of the time; abortion and racial segregation.

Themes and motifs
1. Choice; where and how to sit, to stay married or not, pregnancy or abortion.
2. bust of Laocoön sculpted by a dead uncle. As Laocoön was bound by serpents, Jake feels himself bound into inaction
3. "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a sense of seeing and comprehending all available paths of action and the futility of choosing among them
4. "Mythotherapy" to move Jake beyond his paralysis by giving him arbitrary decision-making principles and having him take on identities by wearing "masks"—assuming roles. He tells Jake "fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life". These distortions—an approach Jake calls "mythoplastic"—people employ to with the arbitrary conditions life thrusts upon them.
5. Both Jake and Joe use their intellects to distance themselves from their emotions
6. Sexual relations:
7. horses; 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.

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Jun 27, 2024 Kallie rated it really liked it

I found this devastating, anti-romantic, awakening. Kind of a good thing as my young woman romantic notions needed a shake-up. I had read enough to know that sex/love could be dangerous but perhaps was at the right age for that fact to sink in instead of remaining on some movie screen in my head.

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