The American Century: Literature since 1945 711of existence, the “game” involved in living, that he often finds himself incapable of
reacting, acting out a role. He can always find a reason for doing something, or its
complete opposite. And the action of The End of the Road concerns a time when, on
the advice of his doctor, he attempts to remedy this by becoming a college teacher, to
“teach the rules. Teach the truth about grammar,” the vocabulary of life. The novel
circles around a disastrous travesty of a love triangle when Jake becomes briefly
involved with the wife of a fellow teacher who does believe life can be contained within
one version of it – who, as Jake marvels, is “always sure of his ground.” Yet that
triangular affair, and its dreadful outcome, is less in the foreground than Jake’s
sustained sense of the absence of identity, his or that of others, outside of roles, or the
absence of action or meaning apart from performance. He – and we the readers – are
constantly being reminded that this is a story, one possible version of the world among
an infinite number. What gives the novel its power is the tricky movements of Jake’s
voice, always prone to tell us something and then confide “in other senses, of course,
I don’t believe this at all.” And what gives it its passion is the vacillation, the constant
movement Jake’s awareness of his predicament instigates, between play and paralysis.
The games enforced in The End of the Road, with their painful consequences, conclude
with Jake leaving the college and taking a taxi cab to the airport. Jake’s last word is his
ambiguous instruction to the driver, as he gets into the taxi: “Terminal.”
Jake seems to step out of life and motion as he steps into the cab and out of the
narrative. Life equals language equals story. That is the formula animating Barth’s
work. To cease to narrate is to die: a point that Barth makes more or less explicit in
his use of the figure of Scheherezade in the opening story in his collection, Chimera
(1972). Scheherezade was, of course, the figure in Arabian folktale who stayed alive
simply by telling stories. Telling stories, in turn, spins into fantasy. Barth is fond of
creating worlds within worlds, using parody and pastiche, verbal and generic play to
produce multiple, layered simulacra: copies, imitations of something for which the
original never existed. It could and can never exist because there was and is no reality
prior to the imitation, to tales and telling. So, in The Sot-Weed Factor (1960), Barth
takes up the author of the 1708 Maryland poem with the same title, Ebenezer Cooke,
about whom virtually nothing is known. He then uses Cooke as the hero of a lusty
picaresque tale that is a pastiche of history, conventional historical fiction,
autobiography, and much else besides. The Sot-Weed Factor also raises the issue of
how history and identity are known, by slyly eliding them with all kinds of literary
“lies” from poetry to tall tales and braggadocio to mythology. Giles Goat-Boy, after
its initial framing in the debate over authorship, continues this subversion through
similarly comic devices. The whole modern world is conceived of as a university
campus, controlled by a computer that is able to run itself and tyrannize people. The
book is in part a satirical allegory of the Cold War, since it is divided into East and
West. It is also a characteristically layered fiction, since it parodies several genres
(myth, allegory, the quest, and so on) and a variety of texts (including the Bible, Don
Quixote, and Ulysses). Above all, it translates the earth into an artifice. The world, the
intimation is, is a fable, a structure created by language and, as such, comparable to
the artificial structures created by the author of this novel (whoever he or it may be)GGray_c05.indd 711ray_c 05 .indd 711 8 8/1/2011 7:31:40 PM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 31 : 40 PM