End of the Road
by John Barth
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Once in highschool, I asked one of my more blowhardish teachers (with all the earnestness of a truly desperate cult adherent), "What do I read when nothing in life seems to matter?"
His prescription for my malady was John Barth's End of the Road -- and I'm still recovering from his misdiagnosis. I asked how to get away from that crushing, all-consuming, momentum-sapping conviction that life is meaningless and absurd -- not a half-assed modernist vindication of ...more
His prescription for my malady was John Barth's End of the Road -- and I'm still recovering from his misdiagnosis. I asked how to get away from that crushing, all-consuming, momentum-sapping conviction that life is meaningless and absurd -- not a half-assed modernist vindication of ...more
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Read in September, 1969
recommends it for:
EVERYONE
To quote the author, "I wanted the adventure to teach me this about myself: that regardless of what shifting opinions I held about ethical matters in the abstract, I was not so consistently the same person (not so sufficiently "real") that I could not involve myself seriously in the lives of others without doing damage all around, not least to my own tranquility; that my irrational flashes of conscience and cruelty, of compassion and cynicism - in short my inability to play the ...more
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When I was a young man in the 70s, John Barth was all the rage and I read a couple of his books, and put down some others. Perhaps I was just too busy with grad school to give him the attention others felt he deserved. I enjoyed End of the Road, and it does contain one of my favorite lines from literature. (The protagonist college English teacher is parsing sentences on the board while the spring leaves and buds are ripening and the co-eds sem to also be ripening and thinks to himself: I'd li...more
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Has a copy to sell/swap
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Read in December, 2007
recommends it for:
east coast old money Turbos
Barth is a terrific writer and has his own brand of Objectivism that is pretty intriguing. However, he is such an east coast, old money, misogynistic douchebag- a characteristic that is so painfully evident in "the end of the road" (a first person narrative) that is makes this book a hard read. While reading "the end of the road" this past weekend, I actually threw book across the room after reading a passage in which the narrator justifies he abusive nature towards the wo...more
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Read in July, 2007
I reread this slender Barth volume for the first time in ten years and was absolutely blown away by how great this novel is. (When I was a brash young man in my early twenties, I dismissed this book.) There are compelling details in here about societal norms, conformity, relationships -- all of it lovingly rendered with the absurd rationalism that Barth would bring later to GILES GOAT BOY.
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Read in December, 2007
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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A perfect little novel that exposes much that is bad within the human soul.
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