John Barth - The End of the Road

The End of the Road

by John Barth

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

Back Cover:

Exciting, important, a great American novel.

John Barth emerged as one of the most exciting and promising novelists of his generation with the publication of his first novel, The Floating Opera. The subsequent appearance of The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy has more than justified this promise.

In The End of the Road, Barth tells an intensely perceptive, funny, and savagely realistic tale, with a principal character, Jake Horner, who has been described as "one of the most fantastically dreadful" to appear in a long time.

"The End of the Road has more freshness, more wit and invention, and more intellectual life of its own than most recent American fiction. It is a horrifying book too, and neither the vocabulary nor the situations will recommend themselves to the squeamish." -- Harper's

"A brilliant novel of marital infidelity on a college campus by the best writer we have at the present, and one of the best we have ever had." -- New York Times

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

Copyright 1958 by John Barth.

Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.

All rights reserved, which includes the right to

reproduce this book or portions thereof in any

form whatsoever. For information address

Doubleday & Company, Inc., 277 Park Avenue,

New York, New York 10017.

First Avon Printing, October, 1960

First Avon Library Edition (Second Printing), February, 1964

Third Avon Library Edition (Fourth Printing), October, 1967

Cover illustration by Paul Bacon Studio

Printed in the U.S.A.

In a sense, I am Jacob Horner.

It was on the advice of the Doctor that in 1953 I entered the teaching profession; for a time I was a teacher of grammar at the Wicomico State Teachers College, in Maryland.

The Doctor had brought me to a certain point in my original schedule of therapies (this was in June 1953), and then, once when I drove down from Baltimore for my quarterly checkup at the Remobilization Farm, which at that time was near Wicomico, he said to me, "Jacob Horner, you mustn't sit idle any longer. You will have to begin work."

"I'm not idle all the time," said I. "I take different jobs."

We were seated in the Progress and Advice Room of the farmhouse: there is one exactly like it in the present establishment, in Pennsylvania. It is a medium-size room, about as large as an apartment living room, only high-ceilinged. The walls are flat white, the windows are covered by white Venetian blinds, usually closed, and a globed ceiling fixture provides the light. In this room there are two straight-backed white wooden chairs, exactly alike, facing each other in the center of the floor, and no other furniture. The chairs are very close together -- so close that the advisee almost touches knees with the adviser.

It is impossible to be at ease in the Progress and Advice Room. The Doctor sits facing you, his legs slightly spread, his hands on his knees, and leans a little toward you. You would not slouch down, because to do so would thrust your knees virtually against his. Neither would you be inclined to cross your legs in either the masculine or the feminine manner: the masculine manner, with your left ankle resting on your right knee, would cause your left shoe to rub against the Doctor's left trouser leg, up by his knee, and possibly dirty his white trousers; the feminine manner, with your left knee crooked over your right knee, would thrust the toe of your shoe against the same trouser leg, lower down on his shin. To sit sideways, of course, would be unthinkable, and spreading your knees in the manner of the Doctor makes you acutely conscious of aping his position, as if you hadn't a personality of your own. Your position, then (which has the appearance of choice, because you are not ordered to sit thus, but which is chosen only in a very limited sense, since there are no alternatives), is as follows: you sit rather rigidly in your white chair, your back and thighs describing the same right angle described by the structure of the chair, and keep your legs together, your thighs and lower legs describing another right angle.

The placing of your arms is a separate problem, interesting in its own right and, in a way, even more complicated, but of lesser importance, since no matter where you put them they will not normally come into physical contact with the Doctor. You may do anything you like with them (you wouldn't, clearly, put them on your knees in imitation of him). As a rule I move mine about a good bit, leaving them in one position for a while and then moving them to another. Arms folded, akimbo, or dangling; hands grasping the seat edges or thighs, or clasped behind the head or resting in the lap -- these (and their numerous degrees and variations) are all in their own ways satisfactory positions for the arms and hands, and if I shift from one to another, this shifting is really not so much a manifestation of embarrassment, or hasn't been since the first half-dozen interviews, as a recognition of the fact that when one is faced with such a multitude of desirable choices, no one choice seems satisfactory for very long by comparison with the aggregate desirability of all the rest, though compared to any one of the others it would not be found inferior.

It seems to me at just this moment (I am writing this at 7:55 in the evening of Tuesday, October 4, 1955, upstairs in the dormitory) that, should you choose to consider that final observation as a metaphor, it is the story of my life in a sentence -- to be precise, in the latter member of a double predicate nominative expression in the second independent clause of a rather intricate compound sentence. You see that I was in truth a grammar teacher.

It is not fit that you should be at your ease in the Progress and Advice Room, for after all it is not for relaxation that you come there, but for advice. Were you totally at your ease, you would only be inclined to consider the Doctor's words in a leisurely manner, as one might regard the breakfast brought to one's bed by a liveried servant, hypercritically, selecting this, rejecting that, eating only as much as one chooses. And clearly such a frame of mind would be entirely out of place in the Progress and Advice Room, for there it is you who have placed yourself in the Doctor's hands; your wishes are subservient to his, not vice versa; and his advice is given you not to be questioned or even examined (to question is impertinent; to examine, pointless), but to be followed to the letter.

"That isn't satisfactory," the Doctor said, referring to my current practice of working only when I needed cash, and then at any job that presented itself. "Not any longer."

He paused and studied me, as is his habit, rolling his cigar from one side of his mouth to the other and back again, under his pink tongue.

"You'll have to begin work at a more meaningful job now -- a career, you know: a calling, a lifework."

"Yes, sir."

"You are thirty."

"Yes, sir."

"And you have taken an undergraduate degree somewhere. In history? Literature? Economics?"

"Arts and sciences."

"That's everything!"

"No major, sir."

"Arts and sciences! What under heaven that's interesting isn't either an art or a science? Did you study philosophy?"

"Yes."

"Psychology?"

"Yes."

"Political science?"

"Yes."

"Wait a minute. Zoology?"

"Yes."

"Ah, and philology? Romance philology? And cultural anthropology?"

"Later, sir, in the graduate school. You remember, I --"