The End of the Road
John Barth
 Jacob (or "Jake") Horner, the first-person author of this confession, suffers from "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose from among all possible choices he can imagine. His cosmopsis completely paralyzes him in the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Baltimore just after his 28th birthday, having abandoned his graduate studies at John Hopkins University. He is taken in by a nameless African-American doctor who claims to specialize in such conditions. At the doctor's private therapy center called the Remobilization Farm, Jake is given "mythotherapy", instructed to read Sartre, and to assign "masks" to himself and abolish the ego. Horner would thus get over his paralysis by inducing action through taking on symbolic roles. As part of his schedule of therapies, Jake takes a job teaching at Wicomico State Teachers College, where he becomes friends with the history teacher Joe Morgan and his wife Rennie. Joe and Jake enjoy intellectually sparring, participating in a "duel of articulations". The philosophical Morgans have a marriage in which all must be articulated, and in which "the parties involved be able to take each other seriously". While Joe is busy working at his Ph.D. dissertation, he encourages Rennie to teach Jake horseback riding. She does, and the two talk at length about the Morgans' unusual relationship. After returning from one of their outings, Jake encourages a resistant Rennie to spy on her husband. She is convinced that "real people" like Joe are not "any different when they are alone. No mask. What you see of them is authentic." What she sees of him is disorients her and her vison of the reality of Joe. When Joe discovers that Jake and Rennie have committed adultery, he insists they maintain the affair, in an effort to discover the reasons for his wife's unfaithfulness. Rennie discovers she is pregnant, but cannot be sure whether Joe or Jake is the father. The Morgans visit Jake, Joe with Colt .45 in hand. Rennie insists on having an abortion, or she will commit suicide. Jake hunts for an abortionist under an assumed name, but is unable to find a doctor who will agree to the procedure, and thus turns to the Doctor. The abortion is botched, resulting in Rennie's death. Jake does not know what to feel, and "crave[s] responsibility". His relativist "cosmopsis" confirmed, he reverts to his paralysis. Two years later, as part of his Scriptotherapy on the Remobilization Farm, he writes his story of what happened in Wicomico.