The End of the Road vs. End of the Road: The Perils of Adaptation

End of the Road, the 1970 film adaptation of John Barth's 1958 novel The End of the Road, offers an object lesson in the perils of transferring a subjective verbal medium, literary fiction, into an objective visual medium, film. End of the Road is finally unsuccessful because of its often puzzling departures from Barth's novel, its inability to seamlessly graft the filmmakers's explicit political agenda onto a novel whose politics are, at best, implicit, and its failure to find an equivalent in its mise-en-scene for Jake Horner's essential narrational voice.