Black Humor In The End Of The Road

John Barth is deemed as one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century. His works, especially two pairs including The Sot-weed Factor (1960), Giles Goat-Boy (1966), Lost in the Funhouse (1968) and Chimera (1972) make sure his status as the representative writer of postmodern fiction;therefore, critics show tendency of discussing his works on postmodernism. Of all his works, The End of the Road is Barth's least discussed novel, but it foreshadows his later themes and styles, both great achievements in American literature. Though The End of the Road seems rather tame today, it belongs to "a fresh genre"—black humor fiction—to many critics in the 1950s. Today, not a few people still believe that Catch-22 (1961) is the first novel of black humor, although black humor is a term popular even in daily conversations. This thesis intends to prove that The End of the Road is a novel of black humor through first exploring existentialism—the philosophical framework for black humor—in The End of the Road and then other elements of black humor in the novel.The thesis is a study of The End of the Road, based on the existentialist Camus's theory of absurdity;theory of both humorists including Kant, Freud, Bergson and critics of black humor including Patrick O'Neill, Mathew Winston, John Morreall. It includes four chapters. Chapter one is an overview of Barth's literary works including The End of the Road and traces the context of black humor in world literatures to prepare for the later discussion of black humor in The End of the Road. Chapter two analyses the embodiment of existentialism in The End of the Road with Camus's theory of absurdity. Chapter three discusses the embodiment of black humor in The End of the Road with the theory of humorists such as Kant, Freud, and Bergson. In more detail, Chapter three focuses on discussing two features of black humor, including comic incongruity of characterization and the open-ending. Chapter four concludes that, throughanalysis of black humor in The End of the Road, a novel that takes ordinary subjects such as love and marriage, different from the traditional subjects of black humor fiction, which mostly emphasize man's plight in wars and other bizarre disasters of weird nature, the thesis aims to demonstrate that literature of black humor stretches much farther back and forward in the history of US literature and across the US national borders than what people generally (mis)perceived.