do Barth's women defy male control: in sex, in pregnancy, in death." To Judith Wilt, Rennie appears to assert herself in a seeming determination to die on the abortion table, cutting herself with the curette and inhaling her own vomit; there is no evidence in the book beyond her own assertion that Rennie had ever been pregnant. Barth returned to the subject of abortion in Sabbatical in 1982. To literary theorist Michael LeMahieu, Barth's first two novels confront a logical positivist "separation of facts and values" common in postwar American fiction. The End of the Road displays "aesthetic resistance to the philosophical realism it desires results in a state of narrative, logical, affective, and ethical exhaustion at the end of the book". The narrative conflict echoes an ethical conflict between the characters' value systems that Joe insists is inevitable. Adaptations The End of the Road is the only work of Barth's to have been adapted to film. Director Aram Avakian's loose adaptation (1970) stars James Earl Jones, Stacy Keach and Harris Yulin in their earliest feature roles. Graphic scenes earned the film an X rating, such as those of the botched abortion and of what Barth calls a "man rapes chicken" scene not found in the book. Barth and critics widely panned the movie; Barth wrote disdainfully about it in the introduction to the 1988 single-volume edition of The Floating Opera and The End of the Road. Academics Ken Pellow and Rita Hug opined that the linguistic, literary and philosophical aspects of the book made it difficult to adapt; they argued that Jake Horner's frequent speaking to the reader is key to the book's effectiveness but does not lend itself to film. Director Paul Edwards made a stage adaptation of the novel for Roadworks Productions in 1993, with John Mozes as Jake, Kate Fry as Rennie, and Patrick McNulty as Joe. Edwards makes Jake's immobility central to the play; it opens with him seated and writing, and closes with him doing the same until the audience has left. The production won a Joseph Jefferson Award in 1993. Notes References Works cited Primary sources Secondary sources Academic journals Books Newspapers Web Further reading 1958 American novels American novels adapted into films Existentialist novels Novels about abortion Novels by John Barth Novels set in Maryland American philosophical novels Wicomico County, Maryland Doubleday (publisher) books