The World According To Garp

Garp and Helen are constantly plagued by anxiety, which Garp later understands to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The family’s charming habit of referring to anxiety and their fear of death as the “Under Toad” begins after a family vacation to the beach. Garp and Helen warn their young boys about getting caught in the undertow, but young Walt hears this as “Under Toad” and pictures a large creature rising from the depths to swallow him. Throughout the novel, the family relies on this image to convey their worries of constant threats: “Garp and Helen evoked the beast as a way of referring to their own sense of danger” (408).

Garp is greatly burdened by the responsibilities of parenting and maintaining constant vigilance, believing that he must envision every potential threat in order to save his children from it. His writing suffers as he is occupied by nightmares:

It was his imagination that was keeping him up, Helen told him; one sign that he hadn’t been writing enough, Garp knew, was when he had too much imagination left over for other things. For example, the onslaught of dreams: Garp now dreamed only of horrors happening to his children (287).

Even his characters are unable to escape the same kinds of fears; the protagonist of “Vulnerability” views himself as a kind of suburban vigilante: “So it’s the open road for training, but it’s the suburbs I'm training for. In my condition I am more than a match for a car caught speeding in my neighborhood” (275).

Like Garp, the vigilante is always on the lookout for any potential danger to children. Even the newly bad smell of his six-year-old son’s breath forces Garp to ponder the ways that the world is out to get Duncan:

Perhaps it was just that Duncan was Garp’s firstborn child, but Garp worried more about Duncan than he worried about Walt—even though a five-year-old seems more prone (than a ten-year-old) to the usual childhood accidents. And what are they? Garp wondered. Being hit by cars? Choking to death on peanuts? Being stolen by strangers? Cancer, for example, was a stranger (235).

Garp fears that such anxiety will become a self-fulfilling prophecy, enabling the creation of every bad thing that he ponders. This fear emerges in the heavily autobiographical The World According to Bensenhaver, the book jacket of which proclaims, “[This book] is about a man who is so fearful of bad things happening to his loved ones that he creates an atmosphere of such tension that bad things are almost certain to occur. And they do” (392).

Garp’s anxiety exacerbates feelings of guilt and vulnerability. He fears that men are inherently sexually violent and worries that this applies to himself as well. Garp separates his mother’s act of rape that enabled his conception from men’s rapes of women, and he sees each act of rape by a man as a blight on his own character: “Perhaps rape’s offensiveness to Garp was that it was an act that disgusted him with himself—with his own very male instincts, which were otherwise so unassailable. He never felt like raping anyone; but rape, Garp thought, made men feel guilty by association” (178). Indeed, Garp fears that he is so consumed with sexuality that his distractibility will cause his children’s deaths. In one nightmare, Garp dreams that he is too busy masturbating to watch out for enemy planes that bomb his children, and “[t]his, true to the nature of dreams, was forever unclear: precisely why he felt so guilty, and why they looked at him as if they’d been so abused” (289).

Garp fears the world around him, especially the actions of men. He believes that what he sees as the apparent inherent qualities of men cannot be changed and believes he is doomed to succumb to male curses of sexual excess. 

Garp holds in high esteem the relationship between reader and author, and this relationship is especially magnified in the relationship between the reader and author of a handwritten note. For Garp, written language, more so than spoken language, enables a special kind of truth.

Garp’s childhood fascination with Helen turns into fixation when he realizes that her literary acumen can transform him into a better writer. Though he repeatedly cheats on her, lies to her, and betrays her, he always considers her his primary critic and the ultimate voice of literary reason. As a literature professor, her job naturally requires her to read other people’s writing, but he finds that he is not bothered by this until Helen starts staying up late to read Michael Milton's writing: “Helen, he knew, was reading someone else. It did not occur to Garp that she might be contemplating more than literature, but he saw with a typical writer’s jealousy that someone else’s words were keeping her up at night” (273).

Like many novelists, Garp fears the influence of an encroaching world on his preferred medium. He loathes televisions, of which their “glow looks like cancer, insidious and numbing, putting the world to sleep. Maybe television causes cancer, Garp thinks; but his real irritation is a writer’s irritation: he knows that wherever the TV glows, there sits someone who isn’t reading” (238). For Garp, the written word enables communication and sustains relationships; willingly abandoning the celebration of the written word suggests a prioritizing of entertainment over substance.

The relationship between reader and author is also examined in the character of Jillsy, John Wolf’s unconventional choice of first reader. Jillsy is a working-class cleaner, unlike the literary snobs who decide what will get published, and Wolf sees her as a better representation of “real people.” Jillsy finishes the books that feel real, and her experience of reading The World According to Bensenhaver confirms for Wolf that, though the book is undoubtedly disturbing, it has literary merit. Jillsy’s visceral reaction to the text foments her support of Jenny and her dislike of Garp: “You’d think it was him who got raped, the way he went on and on” (388).

Handwritten notes function as the primary means of communication during the Garp family members’ various periods of convalescence. Following the car accident that kills Walt, Jenny functions as the emissary between Garp and Helen, delivering notes made necessary by Garp’s broken jaw and inability to speak. The Ellen James Society also connects the art of the handwritten note with the pain of betrayal; the women who willingly cut out their tongues and thereby must rely on handwritten notes the rest of their lives do so because a young girl was raped and her tongue was cut out by her rapists. In forgoing their ability to speak, the Ellen Jamesians create a kind of premeditated contact with the outside world, often carrying multiple notes in preparation for responses to commonly asked questions.

The written word functions as an art form that protects and establishes the relationship between reader and writer, creating a kind of closeness not attainable through any other medium.

Garp (and, it is implied, Irving) struggles with the question, “Can a piece of fiction actually be totally non-autobiographical?”

Garp wonders if trauma can make him a better writer. Duncan becomes an artist after losing his eye; the accident forced him to see the world in a new way and allowed him to translate different media more easily. However, Garp resents the implication that The World According to Bensenhaver is well-written because he gained insight after Walt died, and he hates that John Wolf chooses to use the tragedy to market the novel.

Garp’s struggle to accept that he became a better writer after enduring considerable trauma parallels Bensenhaver’s struggle to accept that he became a better, more sympathetic cop after finding his pregnant wife’s murdered body. Jillsy, John Wolf’s unconventional reader, finds that Bensenhaver resonates with her because it contains realistic portrayals: “‘A book feels true when it feels true,’ she said to him, impatiently. ‘A book’s true when you can say, “Yeah! That’s just how damn people behave all the time.” Then you know it’s true,’ Jillsy said” (389). Garp is deeply frustrated that this aspect of the novel’s background generates the most press:

Garp always said that the question he most hated to be asked, about his work, was how much of it was ‘true’—how much of it was based on ‘personal experience.’ True—not in the good way that Jillsy Sloper used it, but true as in ‘real life.’ Usually, with great patience and restraint, Garp would say that the autobiographical basis—if there even was one—was the least interesting level on which to read a novel (393).

Garp maintains that writing fiction “[is] the act of imagining truly—[is], like any art, a process of selection” (392). Despite Garp’s conviction that the novel is clearly fiction, his readers argue otherwise: “Her theory would later be expressed by the critic A. J. Harms, who claimed that Garp’s work was progressively weakened by its closer and closer parallels to his personal history” (450).

While Garp believes that he can maintain distance between the events of his life and the events of his fiction, he also believes that the way he lives his life impacts the way his fiction is read. Garp remains self-conscious of the effects of an author’s personal life on the reader’s perspective and mode of engagement with narration. He tells Helen that serious writers die by suicide:

In the present fashion, you’ll agree this is one way of recognizing a writer’s seriousness? Since the art of the writing doesn’t always make the writer’s seriousness apparent, it’s sometimes necessary to reveal the depth of one’s personal anguish by other means. Killing yourself seems to mean that you were serious after all (401).

Garp’s suggestion that suicidal writers are the ones who best understand universal human truths stands at odds with his desire for his books to be read in a vacuum. Unsurprisingly, after his assassination by an Ellen Jamesian, interest in his books multiplies, and he achieves more commercial success than ever.

Garp offers multiple answers to his original question but never successfully separates his works from his personal history and experiences.