to a rival who", like Jake Horner, "refuses to provide any fixed identity to hate, compete with, or understand". Critical views As The Floating Opera and The End of the Road make little display of the metafictional formal prowess of Barth's later works, critics often overlook them. Some consider these first two novels little more than apprentice works, while others see them in light of the later works, removed from their historical and social context. Critics have been divided on whether Barth identified with the narrator's beliefs; this appeared probable to John Gardner, Richard W. Noland, and Tony Tanner, while Beverly Gross and Campbell Tatham believed the tragic ending demonstrates the contrary. Philosopher Robert C. Solomon included excerpts from the book in a collection on existentialism. Gardner objected to the book's absurdist philosophy, "vulgarities of style", and a "touch of life-hate which reveals itself in the author's fascination with the ugly, the disgusting"; Gardner found this "fascination" perplexing, as "in other respects Barth seems all sunshine and good cheer". Christopher Conti saw a "moral-satiric design" also found in Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and Gardner's Grendel (1971), in which the reader is meant to see through the moral failings of the novels' "monstrous narrators". Charles B. Harris sees Jake's and Joe's intellectualism as a Freudian obsessional neurosis. To Freud, he writes, the source of such a condition lies in "the chronic existence of love and hatred, both directed towards the same person and both of the highest degree of intensity". Rennie expresses this overtly when she tells Jake, "f I love you at all, I don't just love you. I swear, along with it I honestly and truly hate your God-damned guts!" To Dirk Vanderbeke, the "masks" the Doctor prescribes mask the "essential emptiness" of egoless existential philosophy. He writes that, anticipating Michel Foucault's theories of the self in The Archaeology of Knowledge (1974), all the characters wear self-defining masks that they at some point let slip, and that Jake's paralysis stems from an inability to choose a role with which to participate in society. Vanderbeke writes, "Mythotherapy is not simply the cure for Jacob's state of mind but the general mode of human existence." Cynthia Davis sees the women in Barth's early works as lacking the choice-making, identity-forming dynamism of the men; Rennie has no viewpoint of her own, only ones formed by Joe or Jake. Davis states, "Only as bodies