Nihilistic Catastrophe:Barth’s The End of the Road

刘慧芳

(四川外语学院，重庆 400031)

John Barth is considered to be among the top novelists in 20thcentury America，and the foremost practitioners of postmodernism and met fiction.The End of the Road is Barth’s second novel.Many influential papers and magazines also have not stinted words in commending The End of the Road upon its success.Time ，for example，led off a book section with over two columns devoted to The End of the Road and concluded:“Barth is clearly one of the most interesting younger US.Writers and he has produced that rarity of US.Letters—a true novel of ideas”［1］.The New York Herald Tribune Book Review described the novel’s theme as“profound and timely”and went on piling up such adjectives as“imaginative，unconventional，penetrating and entertaining”［2］.

Barth’s End of the Road is a novel that plays with various philosophies，submits them to humorous linguistic analysis，and trots them out to be parodied or dealt with satirically.In its faux-Melvillean opening line，its narrator announces:“In a sense.I am Jacob Horner.”Instantly，Barth instigates several suggestions about Horner’s personality and character:his multiple perspectives on everything，his indecisiveness，questions about his identity and his security.

The narrator Jacob Horner is writing the work in 1955 at the Remobilization Farm，a clinic for the psychologically paralyzed run by the Doctor.Horner seems to be writing the novel as therapy for his paralysis(“Scriptotherapy”is one of the Doctor’s standard approaches).The movement from nihilism to relativism is expressed by two characters.Horner，a nihilist，considers that the arbitrary nature of values constitutes a rationale for having none.Joe Morgan，a relativist，agrees that values are relative but insists that one must commit to them as though they were absolute.Their philosophical conflict is acted out physically and emotionally，with Joe’s marriage as a test case.Joe’s wife，Rennie，commits adultery with Horner，becomes pregnant，and dies during an illegal abortion arranged by Horner.

Like many a popular fiction，The End of the Road quickly place its central characters in situations that compel all but the most hardened of readers to ask that most basic question of fictions—“And what happens next?”Each is propelled by the main charge of concern for the fate of Jacob Horner.Will Jacob recover from his totally debilitating inability to decide?Will he hold the lady of his choice?Like boosters on the rocket，lesser questions temporarily push our attention in this or that direction.What is“Mythotherapy”?Is Jacob Horner’s doctor a charlatan?How long will Joe Morgan tolerate Jacob’s affair with Rennie?

Some persons，usually mostly men，is repelled by Jacob Horner and Joe Morgan.They see Jacob and Joe as overdrawn，as a favorite critical term of–“unrealistic.”The former is a caricature of weakness，the latter of authoritarian strength.While the others，usually mostly women，have a more overtly visceral reaction.They generally have little trouble recognizing the reality behind the overdrawn males，but are horrified by the abortion scene and the death of Rennie.

What interests me about both reactions is their intensity，a kind of intensity generated only when an author has directly and successfully involved the passions of readers.Joe Morgan is a man who cannot tolerate the outcome of what he believes are his own strongly held values.Who among us does not extol the value of free choice，yet feel betrayed when others do not act as we would choose for them to act?I suspect it is a contradiction felt by almost all parents，teachers，lovers，and even politicians in democracies.Rennie is the typical victim of such a character—a person torn both by the fact that her desires do not always match those of her husband and by the very mixed signals he sends.

And poor Jacob，trapped among even the simplest and least consequential alternatives.What Barth has done in The End of the Road is to humanize a major intellectual preoccupation.Jacob Horner’s indecisiveness is solidly based on both the contemporary intellectual certainty of the impossibility of certainty and a variety of other influences.The former derived variously from a host of contemporary philosophical positions，modern physics，and existentialism.

Alongside Horner’s“cosmopsis”—his inability to appreciate the universe—is a set of problems that are the stuff of which popular novels are made.He is troubled that he does not measure up to other men，especially the decisive Joe Morgan，that he lacks something that will forever debar him from what he conceives to be even ordinary success and satisfaction.Barth’s dramatization of the affair with Rennie，complete with an insanely jealous husband who will not admit his jealousy，is both comic and moving.The starkly told abortion scene—from the search for a quack who will perform the abortion，through the horrors of the abortion itself to Rennie’s death—is a passionate statement of society’s need for a safe way of handling unwanted pregnancies.

Jacob Horner，the narrator of End of the Road，is a successor to Todd(who is the hero in Barth’s first novel The Floating Opera).“I deliberately had him ［Todd］end up with that brave ethical subjectivism，”Barth says in a letter quoted by Gregory Blue-stone，“in order that Jacob Horner might undo that position in#2 and carry all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road!”［3］Herbert Fingarette has observed that an acceptance of the arbitrariness of value combined with the recognition of the necessity to commit oneself to this uncertainty can lead to one of three possible consequences:

1)integrity，the willingness to treat one’s decisions seriously and to live by them;2)evasion，the making of decisions without serious concern for or acceptance of the implications of our act;and 3)dogmatism，initial commitment with subsequent refusal to face the recurrence of anxiety and the need for those new acts of commitment which life forces upon us from time to time［4］.

In The End of the Road，little integrity is evident，but there is much evasion and dogmatism.At times，Horner’s paralysis of will may take simply the form of an inability to make a decision.When for all arguments in favor of something(the taking of a teaching job，for example)“a corresponding number of refutations lined up opposite them，one for one，so that the question of my application was held static like the rope marker in a tug-o’-war where the opposing teams are perfectly matched.”［3］8At other times，Jacob is the passive victim of moods.He may be manic or depressed，or he may have no mood at all.At such times he is，as he says，“without a personality”［3］31.

But these periods of no mood usually pass or are easily broken by outside interference.They are related to Jacob’s doubts as to his identity-“In a sense，I am Jacob Horner，”he says in the opening statement of the novel.Only once does he reach a state of complete cosmopsis.In the Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore， after abandoning graduate study at Johns Hopkins，he has gone to take a train to any place he can afford.He runs out of motives and remains seated on a bench，like Melville’s Bartleby，for the next eleven hours.“There was no reason to do anything，”he says.

My eyes …were sightless，gazing on eternity，fixed on ultimacy，and when that is the case there is no reason to do anything-even to change the focus of one’s eyes…It is the malady cosmopsis，the cosmic view，that afflicted me［3］60.

The spell is broken by the Doctor，an elderly Negro who operates an extra-legal farm for the treatment of immobility and paralysis.He is，as Jacob says，“some combination of quack and prophet.running a semi-legitimate rest home for senile eccentrics …”［5］69.As“a kind of superpragmatist”［5］68，the Doctor adapts his treatment to the patient.He has a system of therapy for any kind of person or illness，and he takes Jacob to his farm to treat the cosmopsis.Jacob，he says，must act impulsively.He must also take a job teaching prescriptive，not descriptive，grammar，which leads Jacob to the Wicomico State Teachers College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore，the scene of the main action of the book.And he must be instructed in Mythotherapy，which is，the Doctor says，based on two assumptions:“that human existence precedes human essence，if either of the two terms really signifies anything;and that a man is free not only to choose his own essence but to change it at will”［5］71.The point for Jacob is that he is to assume a role to adopt quite arbitrarily a character which will be an alternative to the non-identity of cosmopsis.“This kind of role-assigning is myth-making，and when it’s done consciously or unconsciously for the purpose of aggrandizing or protecting your ego.It becomes Mythotherapy”［5］72.

So Jacob adopts this pragmatic，arbitrary，yet fluid therapy as a way of avoiding cosmopsis.The role he assumes is unimportant，so long as it is a role.He can change when he wishes to.But Joseph Morgan，who teaches history at Wicomico State，cannot.Like the Doctor，he understands the arbitrariness and relativity of all roles and values.But on this awareness he builds his own arbitrary but dogmatic system by which he lives.Unlike Jacob，Joe is always certain of what he does.“Indecision，”Jacob says of him，“…was apparently foreign to him;he was always sure of his ground;he acted quickly，explained his actions lucidly if questioned，and would have regarded apologies for missteps as superfluous”［3］29.But his grounds of action are as arbitrary as Jacob’s.He knows that his personal code is not logically defensible，that it is subjective，and that he is only right from his own point of view.One operates in this way，as he says，“because there’s nothing else”［3］39.

But what might for a man of the Enlightenment be the basis for a pluralistic and tolerant view of value becomes for Joe a personally absolute system on which he is as unyielding as the most committed ideologue.One of these absolutes is“marital fidelity，”“taking your wife seriously”［3］39.As a result of this view，Joe becomes Pygmalion to his wife，Rennie.He attempts to mold her into his idea of what Joe Morgan’s wife should be.And to test her fidelity to their private code he exposes her deliberately to Jacob.Herbert F.Smith sees the ensuing struggle between Jacob and Joe for Rennie as a kind of philosophical paradigm.Joe，he thinks，represents Reason(Being)，Jacob Unreason(Not-Being or moral nihilism)，and Rennie the tabula rasa［5］68.In this scheme Joe is God，the creating and ordering force，but“one who does not understand what has happened to his otherwise sufficient rules of causality”［5］72.This is a bit too allegorical，and it also misses the extent to which both Jacob and Joe represent not-being.Joe’s single abstract system is ultimately no more creative than Jacob’s more flexible one.Both systems are simply a response to the sense of nothingness，and both systems fail in the final analysis.Because they are not adequate to a concrete situation in which concern and responsibility are required，not an abstract code of behavior.Thus Jacob and Joe share the responsibility for Rennie’s death by criminal abortion.She is the“ethical vacuum”［5］75on whom both impose their abstract roles，Jacob inadvertently，Joe actively.What begins as an “ideological farce”［6］60thus moves，like Waugh’s A Handful of Dust，grimly and efficiently from comedy to tragedy.

John Barth assents to the critics’identification of his early work—or at least his second novel，The End of the Road—with Black Humor in his 1988 essay“Postmodernism Revisited”［7］16.To Barth，Black Humor was just an early phase of postmodernism as it convulsed aborning.So his real business lies further on，in attempting to define a literary postmodernism that might be more than just an omnium gatherum for contemporary sensibilities.

Horner’s viewpoint towards suicide finds itself both funny and annoying.Camus’s essay，“The Myth of Sisyphus”，holds that the fundamental and serious question of his philosophy is suicide;accordingly，he focuses on discussing whether life is or not worth living and probing into a series of phenomena of absurdity.Horner discusses his own attitude towards suicide several times in the novel.His explanation why he does not choose suicide is comic as he takes the serious topic as a little case.For example，

Stendhal claims to have once postponed suicide simply out of curiosity about the contemporary political situation in France:he wanted to see what would happen next.And，apart from cowardice，there was a similar thing that stayed my hand—since the evening of my last interview with Rennie.Joe had not been to school—I could not kill myself at least until they were answered，if for no other reason than that from one very special point I would never learn whether doing away with myself had been called for［8］105.

According to Camus，suicide is one of the three responses when people confront absurdity and he discusses it very seriously.It is rather ridiculous that Horner decides not to commit suicide just for satisfying the individual curiosity，but not for any other reasons.However，it proves that he is very brave while confronting the absurdity including the inevitable death.When he is waiting for Morgan’s reaction towards the adultery，he cites Stendhal as an example to make fun of himself.The famous writer has been his model to imitate，and the excused which Stendhal applied to defend against death proves that Stendhal is not afraid of anything since death has been his object of laughing at.Possessing the same courage，Horner’s excuse of refusing to commit suicide sounds rather comic but impressive.It proves that he can take everything casually，including a serious thing as life，in a light-hearted manner.It is funny that Horner adopts an indifferent attitude towards anything including death.Then it is not surprising at all that he admits he is a depressive and receives the treatment of a quack，though it is unknown where the doctor comes from.

From start to the end，Horner keeps a clear head and has sharp eyes to observe the absurdity.He is an absurdity in the absurd world.On the surface，he is a man without emotions and takes an indifferent attitude towards everything;however，in his inner world，he is eager for love，seaside and sunshine.When he lives in Wicomic city，though he still suspects the meaning of his own existence，he starts to search for the motivation of living and shoulders the responsibility，especially when he is busy in looking for a doctor for Rennie.He is also responsible for his own deeds:when Rennie is pregnant，different from Morgan，he takes vigorous actions to find a doctor.However，the external world makes a joke on him，as it is rather ridiculous that it is the active Horner plays a role in smashing other people’s world.

The Morgan philosophy with its insistence on pure reason is logical but unreasonable，but Rennie holds it up as a Bible.Morgan uses the principle of equality to cheat Rennie and tries to obliterate the consciousness of individuality from her mind.In consequence，Rennies has been his puppet:she is publicizing his philosophy all the time.Rennie had totally lost her own individuality.Being unsure of herself，she imitates Morgan’s mannerisms like whipping her head from side to side.

In people’s eyes，Morgan is an embodiment of rationality，and his behaviors strictly accord with his philosophy.Morrell holds that Barth arranges a contest between Horner who has no values and Morgan who has the relative values of his marriage and the rationalist principles governing it［9］17.Humor lies in the face that Morgan’s actions in real life goes against his own philosophy.In public，Morgan represents rationality.In private，his action is absurd.At the scene of peep，Morgan behaves absurdly:

“Ah!Passing a little mirror on the wall，Joe caught his own eye.What?What?Ahoy there!”He stepped close，curtsied to himself，and thrust his face to within two inches of the glass.Mr Morgan，is it?Howdy do，Mr Morgan.Blah bloo blah.Oo-o-o-o blubble thlwurp.He mugged antic faces at himself，skurching up his eye corners，zblooglling his mouth about，glubbling his cheeks.…He turned slightly，and we could see:his tongue gripped purposefully between his lips at the side of his mouth，Joe was masturbating and picking his nose at the same time［3］69.

Morgan’s indecent conducts are funny and reflect that he is silly as a matter of face，totally different from his public appearance.

Morgan’s thinking mode conflicts with the reality.His philosophy proves to be ridiculous in front of reality.The darkest requirement has been raised:Morgan demands absurdly that in any case，Rennie and Horner should adulterate again，and this time they had better be conscious of their motives and able to explain them later.Morgan’s order is rather absurd.

It is also absurd that Rennie considers Morgan is the centre of her life and she worships him as a perfect God.Rennie’s description of Morgan is funny.In her eyes，Morgan is wonderful，strong，and nobody can compare with him.Before Horner shatters the myth of Morgan，in Rennie’s mind，Morgan is just the God.Her blind worship proves that she has lost her individuality，while that point of view explains the reason of her disaster.

In the absurd world，Horner，Morgan，and Rennie take different roles;however，all of them are typical characters of black humor literature who are“antiheroes，caricatures of the innocent，inept，depraved，or insane”［10］21.Barth emphasizes the blackness of the absurd existence by exposing comic incongruity of characterization，as a result，absurdity has been strengthened while arousing laughter.

In the novel，Barth devises all the characters doubt the existence of absolutes，undermines the foundations of all kinds of authorities，and experiments with any new writing technique and literary genre.Actually，the book is apparently colored with nihililsm and postmodernism.For instance，from this book，the reader will find fragments of inscriptions.And the writing style in the story is anti-conventional，for Barth deliberately omits the past of all characters，makes the reader accept the bizarrest behavior without much question，and ignores the human and social setting of the action.This two-dimensionalism is itself a kind of rebellion，a kind of overthrowing of the traditional way of writing.In addition，in many places the author’s voice and the character’s combine together，which confuse the reader.The writer manages to use this technique to scrutinize the interaction between the reader and the text，while emphasizing the philosophical and literary context of mankind’s urge to tell stories.

Barth is interested in dramatizing ideas in character，and his most important achievement to date in The End of the Road is the embodiment of philosophical ideas in a form of tragic.He suggests the extent to which psychological need determines ideas and beliefs，but he does not probe deeply.He achieves meaning through incident rather than depth of characterization.Barth establishes his affinity with the nihilistic tradition and with the existential novel in his The End of the Road.

［1］A Study in Nihilism ［M］.New York:Time 7221July.1958:80.

［2］Boatwright，Taliaferro.Jacob Horner Came Out of His Corner，and Then—［M］.New York:Herald Tribune Book Review 20July，1958:3.

［3］Barth，John.The End of the Road［M］.London:Penguin Books Ltd，1967.

［4］Herbert Fingarette.The Self in Transformation［M］.New York and Evanston，1965.

［5］Smith.“Barth’s Endless Road”Critique(VI)［M］.1963(Fall):68-76.

［6］David Kerner，Psychodrama in Eden［J］.Chicago Review XIII，1959(Winter-Spring).

［7］Barth，John.Postmodernism Revisited［J］.Review of Contemporary Fiction，1988(3 Fall):16.

［8］Bluestone.John Wain and John Barth:The Angry and the Accurate［J］.The Massachusetts Review(I)，Fall 1959－Summer 1960.

［9］Morreall.The Philosophy of laughter and Humor［M］.New York:State University of New York Press，1987.

［10］Friedman，Jay.Foreward，Black Humor［M］//Pratt.Black Humor:Critical Essays ed.New York:Garland Pub，1993.