236
PARTISAN REVIEW
Then a curious thing happened to some characters in the Ameri–
can novel. They were struck with apoplexy and instantly became
petrified nonpersons. Jacob Horner, central figure of John Barth's
The
End of the Road,
finds himself virtually diminished to immobility and
nothingness in the Pennsylvania Station in Baltimore. He feels that
this is the state towards which his whole life has been drifting with
great consequence. Ebenezer Cooke, Barth's legendary sot-weed factor,
sees his own person and others drowning in a snowstorm of a lterna–
tives which makes every move equally desirable and thus prevents his
becoming an individual with definable contours. And at the end of
Vonnegut's
Cat's Cradle
the world itself is frozen into eternal immobil–
ity, and Bokonon, one of the main characters, has no higher ambition
than converting himself into a statue, lying on his back, grinning
horribly, thumbing his nose at his alleged creator.
Of course, the Cassandras of criticism maintained that they had
anticipated this development long ago, since there was only one
possible outcome of the hero's age-old struggle with reality. Via the
stage of existential puzzlement, where the essence of world and self had
vanished behind question marks, the stage of absurdity, where nothing
connected with nothing, and the stage of alienation, where man 's own
creations had become so overpowering that they threatened to rub out
the self, the hero of contemporary fiction had finally maneuvered
himself into a position where life and all personal distinctions had
been drained out of him. His frantic attempts to become a recognizable
entity had ended in disaster-like Ebenezer Cooke's attempts to become
a someone. "His windpipe glotted with a surfeit of alternatives.... He
closed and unclosed his hands and his mouth, and the strain near
retched him, but it was all a dry heave, a false labor: no person issued
from it. " Thus critics like Jean Grenier had proved to be right when
they noted that "we now walk in a universe where there is no longer an
echo of the
'I.'"
And yet, this seemingly hopeless situation at the same time proved
to be a situation of new departures. The experiences of Jacob Horner in
The End of the Road
are indicative of the solutions some authors had
in mind for their characters. Horner is picked up by a bizarre doctor,
who claims to have an unfailing therapy for all those who are subject
to a total or partial loss of the self.
It
is call ed mythotherapy and is
based on the existentialist assumption " that a man is free not on ly to
choose his own essence but to change it at wi ll. " Life must be seen as a
life drama in which man is invariably the author of the plot as well as
the director who assigns a ll roles to the participating actors. "This
