Title: The World According to Garp Author(s): John Irving Pages: 437 Publisher: Dutton Adult; 1st ed edition Publication date: 1978 Language: English Format: HTML, RTF ISBN-10: 0525237704 ISBN-13: Description: List:
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Study Guide from Gale's Novels for Students.pdf
(John Irving's "The World According to Garp": A Study Guide
from Gale's "Novels for Students")
John Winslow Irving (born March 2, 1942 as John Wallace Blunt, Jr.) is a bestselling American novelist and Academy Award-winning screenwriter.
Since achieving great critical and popular acclaim after the international success of The World According to Garp in 1978, all of Irving's novels, including well-known works The Cider House Rules and A Prayer for Owen Meany, have been bestsellers. Many of his novels have been made into movies, and Irving won the 2000 Best Adapted Screenplay Academy Award for his script for The Cider House Rules.
The World According to Garp is John Irving's fourth novel. Published in 1978, the book was a bestseller for years; Irving has subsequently become one of the most "bankable" modern American novelists.
A movie adaptation starring Robin Williams was released in 1982.
The story deals with the life of T.S Garp. His mother, Jenny Fields, is a strong-willed nurse who wants a child but not a husband (and has no interest in sex except as a means to conceive a child). She encounters a dying ball-turret gunner known only as Technical Sergeant Garp who was reduced to a perpetually priapic mental vegetable by a piece of shrapnel that pierced his head. Jenny has intercourse with the bedridden, uncomprehending, dying Technical Sergeant Garp to impregnate herself. Jenny raises Garp alone, taking a position at a boys' school.
Garp grows up, becoming interested in sex, wrestling, and writing fiction--three topics in which his mother has little interest. He launches his writing career, courts and marries the wrestling coach's daughter, and fathers three children. Meanwhile, his mother suddenly becomes a feminist icon after publishing a best-selling autobiography called A Sexual Suspect (referring to the general assessment of her as a woman who does not care to bind herself to a man, and who chooses to raise a child on her own).
Garp becomes a devoted parent, wrestling with anxiety for the safety of his children and a desire to keep them safe from the dangers of the world. He and his family inevitably experience dark and violent events through which the characters change and grow. Garp learns (often painfully) from the women in his life, struggling to become more tolerant in the face of intolerance. The story is decidedly rich with lunacy and sorrow, and the sometimes ridiculous chains of events the characters experience still resonate with painful truth.
The book contains some elements that appear in almost all John Irving novels: bears, wrestling, Vienna, New England, people who are uninterested in having sex, and a complex Dickensian plot that spans the protagonist's whole life. Adultery (another common Irving theme) also plays a large part, culminating in one of the novel's most harrowing and memorable scenes. There is also a tincture of another familiar Irving trope, castration anxiety, most obvious in the lamentable fate of Michael Milton.
Title: The World According to Garp