Road in 1958; it received only marginally more attention than The Floating Opera. A revised edition in 1967 restored material cut from the first edition, and had a new introduction by Barth. Anchor Books collected these two novels in a single-volume edition in 1988; in his foreword to it Barth states he originally titled the book What To Do Until the Doctor Comes, but Doubleday editor Edward Aswell persuaded him to change it, as he "feared the novel would be mistaken for a treatise on first aid". Background The story narrates the first-person confession of Jacob Horner in the form of a therapeutic psychodrama. Horner writes on October 4, 1955, of events in 1951–53. Barth spent most of his adult life teaching at universities. As in many of Barth's novels, the setting and characters of The End of the Road have an academic background; most of the story takes place on a university campus. The novel tackles controversial contemporary issues such as abortion (which had yet to achieve wide social acceptance) and racial segregation. The End of the Road can be viewed with The Floating Opera (1956) as forming the early, existentialist or nihilist phase of Barth's writing career. This phase was realistic in a modernist sense; it lacked the fantastic elements that manifested themselves in Barth's experimental phase that began with The Sot-Weed Factor (1960). Both novels, while displaying a distinctive style, followed conventions readers expected from a novel, and were part of a realist trend in American novels during the 1940s and 1950s. As The Floating Opera closes, its protagonist, Todd Andrews, concludes that life has no absolute values but that there are relative values that are "no less 'real', for ... being relative". Barth has said he wrote The End of the Road to refute this worldview by carrying "all non-mystical value-thinking to the end of the road", and that the second novel was a "nihilistic tragedy" paired with the "nihilistic comedy" of the first. Barth also sees the book as the second of a "loose trilogy of novels" that concludes with The Sot-Weed Factor, after which he embarked on the fabulist Giles Goat-Boy (1966). Plot Jacob "Jake" Horner suffers from "cosmopsis"—an inability to choose from among all possible choices he can imagine. Having abandoned his graduate studies at Johns Hopkins University, he becomes completely paralyzed in the Pennsylvania Railroad Station in Baltimore just after his 28th