The Aesthetic Alibi in The End of the Road

What is it about?

That one ought to live like an artwork is the ideal of Gilbert Osborn in Henry James’ 'Portrait of a Lady,' the false aesthete who would escape moral judgement in the pose of beauty’s faithful admirer. John Barth’s 'End of the Road' picks up the theme, but in a first-person narrative that struck admirers and detractors alike as a manifesto on the sovereignty of art. The distance between author and hero is preserved, however, by virtue of the dialogical character of the novel, which challenges the narrator’s radical scepticism about the possibility of morality in a world of diverse impulses that never add up to an answerable self. The sceptical idea that the self is merely a performative construct, for example, summons on stage the idea of the self as a bearer of normative commitments. The relation of the moral to the aesthetic in the novel is clarified with reference to Kierkegaard’s 'Either/Or' and Bakhtin’s theory of selfhood.

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