observed rather than as peers to relate to. Only when overcome with emotion does Jake briefly shed his self-consciousness, which he makes sure to quickly regain. Jake is uncomfortable "with women who took their sexual transports too seriously", and prefers his sexual relations to be impersonal; the Doctor recommends he take up masturbation and avoid the complications of marriage or girlfriends. Jake's attitude toward sex is paralleled by his impersonal attitude to human relations in general. Horse symbols permeate the text. Rennie, an accomplished rider, and her husband whip their heads back and forth horse-like when they laugh. Joe is fond of the epithet horseshit when pointing out nonsense. His surname, Morgan, is the name of an American breed of horse. Joe's consistent sureness, his "rationality and absence of 'craft or guile'", according to Thomas Schaub, seem to echo the Houyhnhnms, the race of rational horses in Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. The novel's opening line recalls the "Call me Ishmael" opening of Herman Melville's Moby-Dick. Choices of wording such as "inscrutable" and "wrinkled brow" appear to Thomas H. Schaub to be deliberate echoes from Melville's novel. Style A virtuoso stylist, Barth concerns himself with deflating the pretensions of his characters. He displays an attitude toward sexuality that is free from taboo. Irony and black comedy are plentiful, but come to a sudden emotional halt with the crisis in the abortion room. The End of the Road is in a realistic style that may come as a surprise to those familiar only with Barth's later books. The narrator avoids naturalistic descriptions of his surroundings, and most other details, and describes the physical aspects of life (especially of women) with disgust or contempt. He indulges in occasional bursts of eloquence: "A turning down of dinner damped, in ways subtle past knowing, manic keys on the flute of me, least pressed of all, which for a moment had shrilled me rarely". The realism is not a conventional everyday realism: the situations themselves are fantastic, though plausible. Naturalism makes a significant appearance in the 12th chapter, in which Jake witnesses Rennie's botched abortion and finds himself unable to conquer his emotions with reason. Jac Tharpe saw this change of style as evidence that the chapter had originated as a separate story that was integrated into the novel; Charles B. Harris sees the "sudden use of naturalistic details" as taking on an "integral function" in