The Ethical Tragedy In John Barth’s The End Of The Road

John Barth (1930-) was born in Maryland and became a college writing teacherin the early1950s and has been labeled as the new novelist with absurd factors in hisfiction. The majority of the scholars hold the opinion that there has no closerelationship between John Barth and other novelist like Joseph Heller, ThomasPynchon, Kurt Vonnegut Jr. for they regarded John Barth as existentialist andabsurdist. With the spread of modern literature in America, some American writersstopped their focus on consciousness and directed toward self-reflection andself-definition. According to Barth, he believes that self is the foundation ofunderstanding the world; he uses his protagonists to represent the emptiness behindthe social humbugs.The new American novelists including John Barth show their crazy towardsEinsteinian Relativity and quantum physics. In John Barth’s The End of the Road,Barth’s characteristics have sunk into the absurd dilemma of finding the absolutemeaning of the universe and they turned the blind eyes to Einsteinian Relativity.Influenced by European writers like Camus, Beckett and Sartre, the existentialistfactors are obvious in John Barth’s first two woks: The Floating Opera and The Endof the Road. The “Epistemic Trauma” in modernism has been presented to readersthrough the dilemma of Jacob Horner who has been caged in the cosmopsis.Cosmopsis is the key word in The End of the Road, which means that one who hasthe broad view of things can think of nothing to do that accomplishes anything. Butcosmopsis also means the realization that nothing is worth doing and no human acthas any value, thus ethics is not properly a discipline for human study (Tharpe12).In his novel, The End of the Road, the characters have lost in the dilemma ofdefining themselves in the absurd and unstable world. For them, nothing has therational and logical reasons and this is the representation of Sartre’s existentialistethics. The majority of the previous literature just gave out the general argumentation that The End of the Road belongs to the existentialist novels butscarce literature has explore the reasons behind the dilemma of the protagonists. Inaddition to this, they just categorized the ethical tragedies of the three protagonistsinto one kind but the author of this thesis argues that they are actually three differentethical tragedies:1, the totally loss of the subjective initiative;2, the loss ofindependent subjective initiative and identity;3, excessively strong subjectiveinitiative to the extent that to compel others to obey one’s own subjective valuesystem. Furthermore this thesis extends the exploration for the deep reasons behindthe position of ethic tragedies. The author of this thesis gives out the hypothesis thatBarth’s characters’ disability to balance the relationship between freedom andresponsibility; the objectifications of women are the reasons behind their ethicaltragedies.