The Floating Opera and The End of the Road - John Barth

Category: Humor, Literature, Novel
Language: English
Keywords: Existential nihilism

Written by John Barth
Read by Kevin Pariseau
Format: M4B
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

The Floating Opera and The End of the Road are John Barth’s first two novels. Both concern strange, consuming love triangles and the destructive effect of an overactive intellect on human emotions. Separately they give two very different views of a universal human drama.

The protagonist of The Floating Opera is Todd Andrews, an orphaned war veteran who has been sleeping with his friend’s wife. Todd awakens in the morning determined to commit suicide, having concluded that nothing in life has intrinsic value–but then spends the day methodically reasoning his way into disregarding that fact and remaining a part of the floating opera of life.

In The End of the Road, a man named Jacob Horner finds himself literally paralyzed by an inability to choose a course of action from all possibilities. He begins an unconventional course of “mythotherapy” treatment at the Remobilization Farm, but his eccentric doctor’s directives lead him into a tragic love triangle and from there to the nihilistic end of the road.

17 hrs and 41 mins
October 7, 2011