Themes and motifs The End of the Road is rich in recurring metaphor. In the opening chapter, while in the Doctor's Progress and Advice Room, Jake finds himself in the awkward position of having to choose the manner in which he will sit, with his choices restricted. Jake notes that Rennie has made the same sort of choice-that-is-not-a-choice by remaining married to Joe, and that Joe, in opposition to his philosophies, has to make a "choice" about Rennie's adultery and pregnancy. On his mantel Jake keeps a bust of Laocoön sculpted by a dead uncle. As Laocoön was bound by serpents, Jake feels himself bound into inaction "by the serpents Knowledge and Imagination, which ... no longer tempt but annihilate". This is reflected in Laocoön's grimace, which Jake frequently consults and interprets according to his mood—with admiration, frustration, or indifference. After the disaster of Rennie's abortion, Jake tells the bust, "We've come too far", and abandons it along with his job, car and apartment. Barth coined the term "cosmopsis" in The End of the Road for a sense of seeing and comprehending all available paths of action and the futility of choosing among them. Jake expands on Jean-Paul Sartre's famous existentialist line "existence precedes essence", saying "existence not only precedes essence: in the case of human beings it rather defies essence." The Doctor tells Jake, "Choosing is existence: to the extent that you don't choose, you don't exist." To cope with inability to make decisions, the Doctor prescribes three therapies: the arbitrary principles of Sinistrality ("If the alternatives are side by side, choose the one on the left"), Antecedence ("if they're consecutive in time, choose the earlier") and Alphabetic Priority ("choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter of the alphabet"). The Doctor prescribes "Mythotherapy" to move Jake beyond his paralysis by giving him arbitrary decision-making principles and having him take on identities by wearing "masks"—assuming roles. He tells Jake "fiction isn't a lie at all, but a true representation of the distortion that everyone makes of life". These distortions—an approach Jake calls "mythoplastic"—people employ to with the arbitrary conditions life thrusts upon them. According to Jake, it is the imagination that enables one to cope, and its lack in the Morgans was to lead to their destruction. Both Jake and Joe use their intellects to distance themselves from their emotions; both see others as specimens to be