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''The 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 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. ==Publishing history== While teaching at Penn State, Barth embarked on a cycle of 100 stories he called ''Dorchester Tales''; he abandoned it halfway through to begin his first two published novels. He completed both ''The Floating Opera'' and ''The End of the Road'' in 1955. Appleton-Century-Crofts published ''The Floating Opera'' in 1956, but sales were not strong enough to encourage the publisher to pick up Barth's next offering, which was felt to be too similar to the first book. Doubleday published ''The End of the Road'' in 1958; it received only marginally more attention than ''The Floating Opera''. A revised edition in 1967 restored material cut from the first edition, and had a new introduction by Barth. Anchor Books collected these two novels in a single-volume edition in 1988; in his foreword to it Barth states he originally titled the book ''What To Do Until the Doctor Comes'', but Doubleday editor Edward Aswell persuaded him to change it, as he "feared the novel would be mistaken for a treatise on first aid". 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The End of the Road」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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